


Richie Tozier: Interrupted

by oscarisaac



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Coming Out, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Getting Together, M/M, Slow Burn, ben is a he/him trans lesbian and I'm not taking criticism on this, ft. the intricate rituals we know and love, minor bev/ben, minor mike/bill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21978280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oscarisaac/pseuds/oscarisaac
Summary: NETFLIX   STAND-UPRICHIE TOZIER: INTERRUPTED2019      VM14      1hRichie Tozier relays funny stories about his childhood friends and unveils the truth behind his shocking 2017 stand-up special.PLAY      MY LISTStarring: Richie TozierGenres: Stand-Up Comedy, Irreverent Stand-Up Comedy, ComediesThis movie is: Offbeat, Irreverent, Witty
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 42
Kudos: 243





	Richie Tozier: Interrupted

**Author's Note:**

> 2 months ago I wrote the richie tozier 2017 netflix standup special and made it canon compliant, and it made me so sad that I wrote another version of it where eddie is alive and it turned into the longest fic I've ever written so I guess I'm the clown now. 
> 
> FYI, the movie has much more upsetting content but Bev's past and Stan's fate are both mentioned and talked about though never in graphic detail.
> 
> this was brought to you by (1) my first crush when I was 11 when we were best friends for 4 months and then never saw each other again and (2) the guy I kicked in the balls in 8th grade because I was annoyed that he kept hitting on one of my girl friends because now he's out and proud on social media with his long term boyfriend and I'm single and closeted so once again I am the clown.  
> as richie tozier himself would say, PLEASE comment

**NETFLIX** STAND-UP

RICHIE TOZIER: INTERRUPTED

2019 VM14 1h

Richie Tozier relays funny stories about his childhood friends and unveils the truth behind his shocking 2017 stand-up special.

**PLAY** MY LIST

**Starring:** Richie Tozier

**Genres:** Stand-Up Comedy, Irreverent Stand-Up Comedy, Comedies

**This movie is:** Offbeat, Irreverent, Witty

———————————————————————————————————————————--

“Now I’m gonna get real with you for a second,” Richie says after a joke about the time he worked on  _ Teen Titans Go! To The Movies _ . “I had a hard fucking time figuring out what I wanted this show to be about. 

“And I’m not saying I want to leave you guys with a  _ lesson _ or anything,” he adds, pretending to retch at the idea of imparting advice. “But I also don’t want to come on stage and tell a bunch of jokes and leave, because I’m a narcissistic piece of shit and I’ve got to find a way to be remembered by all of you  _ forever _ . Like, how many times have you seen a stand-up special that you  _ immediately  _ forgot as soon as it was over? I mean, not that you’d know! ‘Cause you fucking forgot about all three hundred of them. And before, like until a couple of years ago, it was never really an issue for me because I was just a moron who’d regurgitate on stage whatever my ghostwriter told me to say. Until I  _ actually _ bombed and threw up on stage. Turns out having a ghostwriter fucking  _ sucks _ , who would have guessed. Do you know the  _ only _ upside of having a ghostwriter? When you fire him, you get to say you’re not haunted anymore.

“So, for the first time in my life, I had to, like, actually sit down and think about what I wanted to leave you guys with. But I just couldn’t fucking figure it out. Super fucking upsetting. The amount of daily introspection I recommend you guys if you want to live a happy, healthy life is exactly zero. And I know this is not my first special since I pulled my head out of my ass and I Whoopi Goldberg’ed the ghost out of my life, so to speak, but last time it was easy because all I wanted to do was set the record straight and come out, pun absolutely fucking intended. So as I was introspecting and shit I started thinking about that whole, like,  _ ordeal _ , right? And I’m self-aware  _ just _ enough to know that the reason why it was so memorable and why it became so  _ fucking _ popular was that, yes, I’m a fucking pro at coming out - like, if  _ coming out _ had been a videogame when I was thirteen I would have been crowned the  _ fucking king _ of the arcade instead of being chased away from it and called slurs; but, really, that special was so memorable because of what happened right in the middle of it. Maybe some of you remember.”

Those who remember begin to cheer and Richie flashes a grin, pleased at how much noise they’re making. 

“It took me two years to piece together  _ what the fuck _ happened then, but I, Richie Tozier, have connected all the dots, and now, for the first time in history, I get to tell you the whole ass story.”

It won’t really be the whole ass story because the Losers have promised to take certain things to the grave; but it will be as close to the whole story as it gets.

* * *

**Part one, or: The one where Richie Tozier plays fucked up versions of Two Truths One Lie**

In the summer of 2017, Richie tours the country with a draft version of the coming-out special he'll perform in the fall for Netflix.

He’s already itching to see his career do a U-turn; but, as of now, he’s still a B-list comedian who acts like he’s an A-list comedian and whose shows only attract middle-aged dudebros and college students who will, with age and enough beer and bad marriages, become middle-aged dudebros as well. For now, it is to these people he must cater if he wants to make enough money on a tour, and he kind of needs that money after disappearing for a whole year. So, if he presented the bros with an hour-long introspective coming out monologue it would be, like, if Buick ceased all productions and started selling massage oils overnight. Richie’s got to be careful; he’s got to do it gradually. Richie’s got to try and sell a brand new Buick to some bro, and when the guy opens the door and asks,  _ what’s this dope smell? _ , Richie can show him that the trunk is full of massage oils in fancy bottles, and the guy will be like,  _ aight, that’s weird but the car’s fine and no homo but those things kinda smell good _ . Then Richie will be able to expand the market and export his Buick to places where they don’t know what the fuck Buick even is yet, and that’s when he’ll throw out the cars altogether and laugh at the fact that he used to sell them at all, and the French will say,  _ encroyable! _ , and the Italians will say,  _ these massaggio oils are-a fantastico _ !, and the U-turn will be complete. Some bros will stick with him because his mom jokes are hilarious, and some will tell him he’s changed and disappointedly shake their heads as they unfollow his Twitter account, and he frankly doesn’t give a shit about any of them. 

**Part one point one, or: Ben and Bev and a Pink Floyd song**

The first Losers to come to his show are Ben and Bev.

They come on the very first night, when he performs at a bar in Los Angeles. 

Richie is so scared he can’t even feel his limbs anymore. But when he walks out on stage Ben gives him a thumbs-up, and he thinks that, if things go horribly wrong, at least he’s got thirty Brazilian soccer players to defend him - plus Bev who is, like, _so_ _scary_ that he’s surprised the clown didn’t just fucking die the first time she insulted him.

The show is surprisingly not a catastrophe. He can practically feel the audience’s relief after he manages not to forget his very first joke, which means that the bar is so low there’s nowhere to go but up. 

After the show, Ben and Bev come up to him with wet eyes, which kicks “killing a demonic clown from outer space” to second place in the list of Richie’s greatest achievements. 

“I’m so proud of you, honey,” Bev says as Ben hugs him.

“You’re killing it, man,” Ben says, voice muffled by Richie’s shoulder. 

The double meaning of Ben’s words doesn’t escape him. For starters, his show is literally called  _ I Killed A Clown _ , in honor of the murdering of the physical manifestation of their fears and a fun nod to the fact that a year ago Richie was actually trialed for murder. But  _ killing it _ , setting themselves free from the virus that fucked with their minds for thirty years - that kind of victory didn’t just come when they crushed Its heart and escaped the sewers. They’re all still grappling with the consequences of thirty years of repressed trauma and stilted growth; they’re still killing it.

The last time they were in the sewers, Richie genuinely couldn’t have given fewer fucks if the clown had decided to spill all his secrets in front of everyone. After being taunted for so long, he felt past caring. If It had told the others:  _ Richie once logged onto WebMD and cried looking at allergy symptoms that he didn’t even have and he had no idea what was happening to him, but what was happening was that he had a big hard-on for a guy he didn’t even remember _ , then Richie would have just said,  _ at least I can get it up, incel _ . But when It was gone, he found out that not much had actually changed. When all was said and all was done, Richie was just a guy who had repressed his sexuality for thirty years frantically pressing his sweater on his best friend’s maimed shoulder to stop the blood flow, only vaguely aware that he was shouting or maybe crying and he couldn’t even figure out which one it was because he’d lost his glasses so everything was foggy anyway. His whole life had changed forever and there was no way to go but forward, but there was still a lot of work to do.

“Stan would be proud, too,” Bev says.

Richie manages a smile because she's right, even though what he's doing now, at forty-one, is basically what Stan did at thirteen, at his own Bar Mitzvah, in front of his entire congregation. 

"Thanks, guys," he says. "And for the record, I saw you laughing so don't even try to pretend you didn't."

"You should have recorded us because it won't happen again."

“It always happens in my heart. Now, shall we?”

They head out of the bar, Richie taking a step back to let them out of the door first. He positions himself between them and wraps an arm around each of their shoulders.

It hits him, like a white-hot punch on his frontal lobe, that congratulations are in order.

“Shit, wait, congratulations!”

“Aw, thanks, Trashmouth.”

A week ago, Ben and Bev announced their engagement. Richie was grocery shopping when they sent a video to their groupchat; when he saw their engagement rings he dropped the box of juice he was holding, and he had to pay for it because the carton was so cheap it mashed on the ground.

“ _ Can you believe we both wanted to propose? _ ” Bev said in the video. 

“ _ I wanted to do it in Los Angeles _ ,” Ben said.

“ _ And I wanted to do it once we’d be back home. _ ”

Both had told Bill, and Bill told Mike, and Mike bet Bill that at least one of them would get too impatient to follow through with their initial plan. Mike won the bet.

“ _ But I got too impatient _ ,” Bev explained. “ _ It was such a nice night and we were sitting outside and I was like, you know what? I’m going to get engaged to him right now. _ ”

“Hope you guys know that your betrothal is an incredibly big lose for people on earth,” Richie says, pulling his friends closer as they walk down the road.

“I don’t know,” Ben says. He reaches out in front of Richie’s body to tangle his fingers with Bev’s. “Feels like a big win from my end.”

“Mine, too.”

“Yeah, well, the babe I saw last night started  _ wailing _ when I told her you two are off the market.”

“You  _ just _ came out, Trashmouth.”

“It’s a compulsion for him,” Bev explains, squeezing Ben’s hand one last time before releasing it. 

Richie’s eyes catch on her engagement ring. They’re rich enough to buy a thousand of those, and they love each other enough to get married with onion rings and not give a shit because that’s not the point. But Richie understands the need to make promises into something tangible. 

He pulls his friends even closer.

They have dinner in a Spanish restaurant where they serve the best gazpacho Richie has ever had. After dinner, in front of three half-empty glasses of booze, Ben pulls out his phone to show Richie a picture of the birdhouse he’s built. He points at all the details of the carving and painting, excited about this indentation, and that glyph, a true fucking artist if Richie ever knew one. 

They both know who the birdhouse really is for; whose memory it’s keeping alive. But Richie also remembers how much Ben loves bringing people together and surrounding himself with  _ life _ . After so much time spent alone in an empty mansion, he gets to gush about playing matchmaker with the sparrows who live near his house. Everybody’s gotta kill the clown their own way.

“Basically it’s like a Clubhouse for birds,” Richie concludes.

“Yeah, why not?” Ben replies with a grin.

“I got a clubhouse for birds, too, y’know.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, my bedroom.”

“Richie,” Bev calls, looking right at him after one last glance at Ben’s phone. She’s tapping her fingernails on her cocktail glass, a fast  _ tick tick tick  _ that suddenly mirrors the beating of Richie’s nervous heart at the intensity of her voice. “Does Eddie know?”

“What? That my bedroom’s a clubhouse for birds?”

_ Fine, _ he thinks; that’s where she headed as soon as he made a dumb joke about being sexually active because of course she knows it’s a lie, of course she knows that if you’re craving ice cream you don’t put an ice cube into your mouth and call it a day.

“That you mention him in your show,” she explains, patient even though she knows that Richie understood her question perfectly.

“Despite popular belief, darling Bev, I’m a moron but I’m not stupid.”

Bev and Ben give each other a glance and lean forward, trapping Richie under their concerned stare. Richie grabs his glass and takes a long sip, cold alcohol chilling and then burning his throat until it hurts, and he wonders if they’ve  _ talked _ about this to each other before - about how  _ transparent  _ Richie has always been. They saw his show three hours ago and they’ve all been together ever since, and  _ yet _ they already seem to be a united front against him. 

“He’ll find out, sooner or later,” Ben says reasonably. “Wouldn’t it be better if he found out from you?”

“I just have one joke about the dumbass teenage crush I had on him thirty years ago, Jesus, Haystack, calm your tits,” Richie says, incredibly well-aware that  _ he’s _ the one who’s getting worked up about this. “It’s not that big of a deal, dude, it’s not like I’m saying I’m still in love with him.”

“ _ Aren’t  _ you?”

“I am, but I never mention that in the show.”

“You do sort of mention it,” Ben replies.

“It’s a bit transparent, Richie,” Bev says, so, so, gently, so unfazed by his confession that Richie knows that they absolutely have talked about this before. 

Richie’s hands are sweating and he tries to dry them on his jeans. His heart is thumping. Forty-one years old, and he feels like he’s about to pass out just for saying something that’s pretty much public knowledge among his friends because  _ really _ , he’s never been subtle. 

“Just don’t let the clown have the last word, yeah? You get to have that,” Ben says.

Richie seizes the opportunity to smirk and let out a delighted gasp. “First you laugh, then you tell me I should have the last word, is this what engagement does to people? Just makes them go batshit crazy? What’s next, you’re gonna let me give a speech at your wedding?”

“Yeah, keep dreaming,” Bev says.

And the thing is this: Richie actually agrees with them. There’s a whole segment of the show that’s pretty much just about the crush he had on Eddie in the ‘80s, so he knows he’ll have to tell Eddie about it at some point. That - that he can confess. 

It would have been a catastrophe if Eddie had found out when they were thirteen, when Richie would spend insane amounts of time thinking about what to tell Eddie next, trying to figure out how to maximize his chances of drawing a reaction from him. 

His want had been innocent when they were kids. He’d always wanted to be with him, and  _ to be with him _ had no real connotations. Eddie was his friend, and that made him happy, and that was it. All he’d wanted, really, was to make Eddie laugh and to never have to see him go back to his awful mother and, maybe, to get just a little closer, and closer and closer, until they would be joined by the hip and they would have  _ so much fun, _ all the time. He’d never told Eddie this - he wouldn’t have been able to voice it, anyway - but that was because kids  _ feel _ without the need to explain, to sort through, to draw lines. 

Then came shame. One time, in class, Richie wrote an  _ E  _ on his textbook. He did it without thinking, mind wandering, but as soon as he saw it, it sent a thrill through him. His heart started beating faster.  _ D _ , Richie wrote, as if someone had playfully shoved him and he’d shoved back, daring, curious to see what the other would do next.  _ D _ , he wrote again, this time much more deliberate.  _ I _ , he wrote, a nice, straight  _ I _ , and there was no denying where this was going. Richie held his breath as if he hadn’t been sure until now. His hand was itching to write the last letter, because tracing Eddie’s name on his book was a shy trial run for tracing it somewhere more permanent, like a wooden bridge or his heart. But a jolt of fear ran through him then, and he raised his head and looked around, only to find Eddie glaring at him. Eddie looked away immediately, and Richie knew that he wouldn’t have been able to see what Richie was writing, but that was still enough for Richie to panic and quickly turn the  _ I _ into a  _ U _ , add a  _ CATION _ and a  _ WE DON’T NEED NO _ , so that now his textbook said  _ WE DON’T NEED NO EDDUCATION -  _ the misspelling, of course, was what made it funny. Richie then drew a box around the quote as if to say _ , yes, that is exactly what I was going for since the beginning _ . Then he ripped the edge of the page where he’d written it, crumpled it, and put it in his mouth. He heard Eddie scoff but kept looking straight ahead. 

The kissing bridge wasn’t long after that. At that point, Richie  _ knew _ \- the words  _ I like him _ slammed against his ribcage often enough for him to know - but didn’t  _ understand _ entirely. Most of all, Richie was sure that he and Eddie would always  _ go together _ and he felt the need to prove that there was permanence in their seemingly volatile friendship. He was also sure that Eddie would push him away if this were ever to be spoken out loud, but he was fine with being the only keeper of that secret.

A year ago, after being acquitted for acting in Mike’s defense and being allowed to finally leave the state of Maine, Richie went back to Derry one last time. The carving was still there, faded with time but visible. Richie crouched next to it, ran a finger over the indentations. By then, he’d finally understood. 

He’s still the only keeper of that particular secret, but he’ll get to it, one day - he’ll tell Eddie about when they were kids, when Richie picked him in that stupid way kids pick each other, and he’ll downplay it as he tells him - he’ll make fun of himself, he’ll talk about having crushes on every boy that gave him attention as if what he felt for anyone else could ever compare to what he felt for Eddie. That he can confess, because what does it matter now? Richie’s dumb teenage crush will always belong to 1989, and Eddie will never have to worry about the idea that Richie still loves him.

Richie still loves him, of course. But he can never tell Eddie about that part. He’d sound crazy if he told him, because as much as his mind has been occupied by thoughts of carved wood, this past year, the truth is that Eddie hasn’t been a big presence in his life. People could have written books about their friendship when they were thirteen, but now it’s fleeting at most. Usually, their interactions are limited to the groupchat, which is just how it used to be when they’d hang out with the Losers as kids, anyway. The fact that Richie wishes things were different is another story. Sometimes he will send Eddie memes, or anti-vax threads to rile him up, or pictures of the shirts he’s thinking of buying; he’ll lay out two or three shirts on the counter and ask Eddie to rank them from least to most hideous, and then he’ll buy the one Eddie places last. On his end, Eddie mostly limits himself to reacting to whatever dumb joke Richie has made, and to sending him links to old, negative reviews of his stand-up routines. 

While Richie was undergoing his trial, he visited Eddie at the hospital during the entire month he was kept there; he did it because they were both stuck in Maine, they were both lonely, they both had nothing better to do except prepare for a trial and recover from a broken shoulder, broken clavicle and punctured lung. They had a reason. Now they don’t, and they always need one to spend time with each other - that’s how it works between them and that’s how they went from that to barely talking. Everything, with Eddie, needs to be justified or he’ll pull away, so Richie can’t just say:  _ I want to be where you are _ . Eddie needs the comfort of excuses, of half-spoken hidden truths and self-assured belligerence to cover up any tenderness.

They’re friends, nowadays; it’s nothing special. So if Richie wants to cry at WebMD pages - in the immortal words of Gossip Girl -  _ that’s one secret he’ll never tell _ . 

**Part one point two, or: Bill and Mike and** **_Survivor_ **

Bill and Mike are the second to come to his show.

Richie knows they’ve come, but he doesn’t see them in the crowd. He wonders if they’ve bailed last minute until he distinctly hears Bill’s snicker drag on just a little bit longer than everyone else’s laugh after one of the shittiest jokes in the entire routine.

After the show, when he finally disentangles himself from the fans who waited for him outside the artists’ entrance, he finds his friends on the other side of the road, hand in hand.

“Are you  _ shitting _ me?” he yells once he’s crossed the street. “Ben and Bev, sure, they’re gay women, they’re notoriously the smartest people on the planet. But you’re upsetting the natural balance of things by figuring stuff out, guys, come on.”

One time, Richie typed his own name into the Twitter search bar and found a lesbian from L.A. arguing with someone who called her “tasteless” for liking Richie. She agreed that Richie’s stand-up was terrible but said that there was something likable about him and joked that he was probably a gay man being forced to perform someone else’s jokes. Richie had never closed an app so fast.

Bill and Mike lead him down the streets of Orlando to get to the restaurant they’ve booked; he walks between them, Bill’s arm around his shoulders.

“Face it, Trashmouth,” Mike says. “You and Kaspbrak are the only ones left.”

“ _ Aw, do you think the evil space clown wants to be boyfriends, too? _ ”

“Come on,” Bill says with a smile.

_ It’s not like that _ , Richie wants to say, but he knows his friends have eyes and ears and hearts so he replies: “I’m insulted that you’d think I could ever leave Mrs K for a man younger than her.”

“He got a divorce, didn’t he?” Bill says.

“Not your strongest argument,” Mike points out.

Bill leans forward so that Mike - on Richie’s other side - can see his face, and he mouths, “ _ what _ !”

“You think the man who just left his wife would want to start a relationship with another guy?” Mike says.

“ _ I mean _ !” Bill exclaims, pointing at himself with a laugh.

“You know what? That actually was a very good argument and I apologize for doubting you.”

“I hope that the restaurant where you guys are taking me has, like, five full stars on TripAdvisor and lets you pet dogs,” Richie says. “Because you’re losing points on me very fast right now.”

He knows he’ll love whatever place they’ve picked since Mike and Bill are quickly becoming restaurant experts in all fifty states. They’re all over the place, lately. And they’re always together, so Richie is extremely ready to admit that  _ he’s _ the one who should have figured it out sooner.

Mike moved to Florida after the trial. He soon realized that he had twenty years’ worth of research on Native American rituals and nothing to do with it, so he donated it to the University of Stanford. Turns out, studying Native American rituals your whole adult life kind of makes you an expert on them, and now other experts all around the country have started calling him to give them his input on their research. Richie is pretty sure Mike would do fine if he didn’t have to think about rituals ever again, but he also suspects he loves traveling the country as an expert of something to which he’s dedicated two decades.

Bill wrote the first good book of his career and then decided to tag along to find inspiration for a sequel. He used to make a big deal about keeping a low profile for Mike’s sake, but then he found out that academic researchers don’t actually give a shit about best-selling horror authors and now he’s been playing tourist and writing his book about found families in hotel rooms. Richie  _ really _ should have put two and two together sooner.

Once they’re seated in the restaurant and the waiter has left them menus, Richie points at Bill and Mike and asks: “So how long has  _ this _ been going on?”

“Remember when you all came to Florida to see my new place last year?”

“ _ That _ long?” Richie sputters, putting a hand over his heart in shock. “That was like  _ nine months _ ago!”

“N-no, yeah, not since then,” Bill clarifies. “But I stayed a couple more days than you guys did - we sent you pictures from the Titanic Artifact Exhibition, remember? And that’s when we realized that there could be something past… past what we had w-when we were in Derry and we were t-t-thrown together.”

“That’s disgusting,” Richie comments offhand.

“We talked a lot on the phone.” Mike glances at Bill and smiles. “Bill was going through his divorce and we…” he trails off, and he tears his eyes away as if he were still unable to bear the way Bill looks back at him - as if it burned through him.

Richie and Eddie didn’t talk during Eddie’s divorce, because Richie and Eddie’s friendship wasn’t special anymore, and maybe Richie deserved it for making so many jokes about Eddie’s mom  _ and _ about his wife. 

He knows Eddie was talking with Bill and Bev about it, though, so he knows he was fine. In fact, Richie knows  _ everything _ . 

_ Divorce _ was a huge hit on the groupchat for a few months, when three out of the six remaining Losers were seeing lawyers and signing papers, all with the same goal though all for a different reason. Bev because she had to get out, because she couldn’t take it anymore, because she had to kill the clown her own way; Bill because there was too much space between him and Audra that couldn’t be closed anymore, because he couldn’t let her into his thoughts anymore - and maybe he’d never really let her in, but the issue had never felt relevant before; Eddie - Richie wasn’t sure, but he guessed it was because coming back to Derry had opened his eyes about accidentally marrying his mother in a sad Oedipal fuckup and made him realize that breaking things off was better for everyone involved. 

The months when divorce had been the only topic all began when Bev texted,  _ Divorce papers ready to be signed!! _ . After everyone had sent their congratulations, the conversation went like this:

**Bill [11/10 - 8:45]**

Full disclosure, I’m also getting a divorce.

**Eddie [11/10 - 8:50]**

Me too.

**Bev [11/10 - 8:51]**

...anyone else?

**Richie [11/10 - 8:51]**

I’m not haunted anymore.

Eddie got really made once Richie explained what he meant.

Bev eventually convinced Richie that he should show Eddie his support.

“He doesn’t want to tell me about his divorce,” Richie said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “He should still know you’re there for him.”

“ _ Obviously _ I’m here for him, he knows that!”

“Richie. You’ve got to  _ let him know _ .”

So Richie sent him a 2013  _ Seventeen _ article called  _ A Taylor Swift Song For Every Love Dilemma _ and texted him,  _ idk much about breakups cause me and your mom are very committed but id be happy to discuss tswift lyrics with you. _ Eddie replied with a graceful,  _ I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m already rebounding with your sister _ . And that was the end of it.

“Bill was going through his divorce and we…” Mike says, and he never finishes the sentence.

“What?” Richie asks. “Don’t leave me hanging, dude, that’s homophobic.”

“First of all, no it’s not, I’m gay,” Mike says. “And second, no, because you’re going to make fun of us and I regret even beginning to say it.”

“I will only make fun of you if whatever you’re about to say makes me jealous.”

Mike glances at Bill, who meets his eyes and smiles.

“Speaking of which - what’s up with you and Eddie?” he asks Richie.

“Nothing. Cheers,” Richie says, raising his glass of water. 

“Are you going to do something about it?” Mike asks.

“Yeah? I’m going to make jokes about his mother until the moment I die. I went through, like, the exact same conversation with Bev and Ben and I’d love to not repeat the experience.”

He texted Eddie last night. He sent him the picture of an email he’d just received - an offer to work on the Emoji movie.  _ Think I should accept it? _ , he asked - without actually considering it at all, because he didn’t wish for his career to plummet back into the ground right after he got his second chance.

Eddie replied _ , Would this be before or after you become a contestant on Survivor in a desperate attempt to stay relevant? _

_ please id go on love island _ , Richie said.  _ survivor hasn’t been relevant since tapatalk.com user chillone spoiled survivor:amazon in 2004. _

Richie had just settled into his hotel room; he was sitting on the bed, back against the headboard, notes in his lap. He was planning on revising his jokes before bed. When his phone buzzed he immediately picked it up, pathetically eager to see Eddie’s reply, and he almost dropped it when he saw that Eddie was calling him. For a moment he just looked at the ID, half-expecting Eddie to end the call after one ring as if nothing had ever happened. The ID stared back at him, E-D-D-I-E typed on his phone so casually.

“Good evening, Mr. Kaspbrak. What can I do for you?” Richie said in a low-pitched voice and fake British accent.

“Oh-- _ I’m sorry, I think I called the wrong--fuck you, Richie. _ ”

Richie chuckled.

“ _ How the hell do you know that thing about  _ Survivor _? _ ” Eddie asked, and Richie laughed so hard he hit his head against the bedpost. That was the excuse Eddie needed to call him, then: reality tv trivia. 

“Please never change,” he said, wiping his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “I know that because I’m friends with Jeff Probst. I mean, I’ve met him. Like, three times, maybe.”

“ _ Am I supposed to know who that is? _ ”

“He’s the host of  _ Survivor _ , Eds, do keep up. What were you even  _ doing _ in 2004 if not watching bad reality tv?”

“ _ I got married in 2004, _ ” Eddie said, deadpan, which made Richie cover his face with his free hand and hate himself. “ _ Would you really become a contestant in a reality show, though? _ ” Eddie asked.

With one last press to his forehead, Richie let his hand fall back down on the mattress. 

“You know, my manager wanted me to be on Big Brother like ten years ago.”

“ _ Did you audition? _ ”

“Nah, I said no.”

“ _ Why? _ ” 

“Because I’m fucking Richie Trashmouth Tozier from Derry, I’m not a contestant on Big Brother.” And: because a voice in the back of his head kept telling him,  _ do you know how much your chances at getting mononucleosis will skyrocket if you share a house with a bunch of strangers? _ , which didn’t even make sense to Richie then, because if he’d been concerned about mono before he would have made vastly different choices in life, but he’d listened to that voice anyways.

“ _ Maybe you do have a brain after all _ .”

“Thanks, babe, I’ll put that on a t-shirt.”

“ _ Asshole. You got a show tomorrow? _ ”

“Yeah. Bill and Mike are coming to see it.”

Eddie didn’t reply immediately, and for a moment Richie thought he’d fallen asleep. He smiled at the thought.

“ _ Hope you fall off the stage and die _ ,” Eddie said.

“Goodnight to you, too.”

“ _ I didn’t--okay. Goodnight, Richie _ .”

When Richie ended the call, he shoved all of his papers onto the other side of the bed and lied down on his side, keeping his phone close as if a name saved in his mobile phonebook could fill the space next to him. He knew it was pathetic. Forty-one years old, grey streaks in his hair, a professional jester, hanging onto four-minute conversations with a man a thousand miles away. 

Sometimes he wondered if he’d be able to move on and find someone else, had the whole supernatural clown trauma not happened. Maybe his attachment to Eddie was just another byproduct of their fucked up childhood and their several near-death experiences. Maybe, yeah. But it didn’t really matter, because the truth - the truth that lived deep within Richie’s heart - was this: he wanted Eddie to be loved. He wanted him to have that. Moving on from him would mean choosing to love someone else; and Richie, who was first and foremost a dick, wondered what the fuck this guy’s deal was, thinking he deserved Richie’s love more than Eddie did. Richie was annoyed at this guy.  _ Fuck _ this guy. Richie didn’t know him and didn’t owe him  _ shit _ . 

_ Say goodnight to your mom for me _ , he texted Eddie. 

_ I’m coming there to kill you _ , Eddie replied.

_ my door’s always open for you _ . His fingers felt cold as he typed, and he absently wondered if arthritis could be psychosomatic. It shouldn’t have been, but his bones never ached as much as when he told Eddie something true and pretended it was a joke. Jokes were, of course, Richie’s best excuse.

“I’m going to make jokes about his mother until the moment I die,” Richie tells Bill and Mike. “While you bitches still haven’t answered my question. When the  _ fuck _ did  _ this _ happen?”

“ _ This _ ,” Mike says. “Has been going on for a couple of months.”

“Well, why the fuck didn’t you tell me sooner? I’m the fucking Bill Nye of gay relationships.”

“No, you’re not,” Bill says firmly. “And you’re the first one we tell, actually. We decided we’d rather do it in person. There’s no rush.”

“We think it’s because we both feel like this happened right when it needed to happen,” Mike explains. “Just because we’ve known each other for thirty years doesn’t mean we’ve been… you know.”

“I call bullshit,” Richie says, raising his hand. He catches a waiter’s attention, and quickly waves at him and shakes his head to signal that he wasn’t calling for him. “We were all in love with Bill when we were thirteen and if you say you weren’t you’re a liar.”

They laugh because it’s true. Bill raises his glass and says: “To the man who won my heart in the end, then.” He’s in love; Richie might throw up; he’d like to hug them, and maybe cry. He’d also like to be the person who wins someone’s heart in the end, but he’s Richie Trashmouth Tozier from Derry, so he knows better than to get his hopes up.

**Part one point three, or: Eddie**

Eddie never comes to his show.

He calls Richie one night when Richie’s in Boston.

“I just came home from a show,” he says as soon as he picks up. “But what’s your excuse for being up at… one forty at night?”

What he means is this:  _ what’s the excuse this time? _

“Oh my god, Eds, are you drunk?”

“ _ No, Jesus, Rich, I’m not drunk, I’m at work _ .”

“The fuck?” Richie looks at his phone to check the time, just to make sure he’s not gone mad. It is, in fact, the middle of the night. He’s standing in a hotel room, jacket still on, and Eddie’s called him.

“ _ Some people have jobs with deadlines, jackass _ .”

Despite his words, Eddie doesn’t sound annoyed; he says  _ jackass _ like less angry men would say  _ dude _ .

Richie takes off his jacket and throws it on an armchair, jostling to keep his phone pressed against his ear. “Eddie. Eddie, light of my life, are you telling me you were running late on schedule?” he asks with a grin. He gets to call him that when he's teasing him.

“ _ Fuck you, I have responsibilities! That’s not even why--you know what, I’m gonna hang up. _ ”

“Wait! Okay, fine, why did you call me?” He doesn’t breathe until he’s sure Eddie won’t hang up, and he squeezes his eyes as if by concentrating hard enough he’ll be able to let Eddie know he’ll let him talk.

“ _ I was Googling this client I’m working on and I found out that he was a popular B-list comedian about 5 years ago, and he was featured in an article in 2015 where they mention you, too. It’s called  _ Comedians We’ve Had Enough Of.  _ Thought I’d tell you what it says. _ ”

Richie grins. “Keep going, I’m already hooked,” he says. He sits on the bed while Eddie speaks, puts his phone on speaker and takes off his shoes.

Eddie inhales before he starts reciting the article like an anchorman. “ _ If you’re looking forward to hearing the same three trite jokes your college roommate’s drop-out friends used to make, Richie Tozier is the comedian for you. He opens his mouth, and suddenly all your memories of that guy who used to eat his snot in high school and now works at Best Buy turn sweet, because Kyle is now Prince Charming in comparison. This man has been talking about «his girlfriend» for two decades and it’s unclear whether one woman has been unlucky enough to be his girlfriend for all this time or several women have somehow fallen into his trap. One thing is however clear: what may sound like self-deprecating jokes are actually telling tales about how disrespectful Richie Tozier is toward the woman he’s dating. So, a piece of advice for whoever that is: girl, dump him _ .”

“Done,” Richie says.

“ _ Wh--did you actually have a girlfriend? _ ”

“I mean, none of those bits were based on anything real, but yeah, I dated women when I was in college.” 

His first girlfriend was a business major called Janet. Janet was short, wore her dark hair short and liked to steal his shirts. After a few years she came out as a lesbian, so that figured.

“And then?”

“Then I told myself I was too busy.” 

He spent his adult life hiding behind excuses. He didn’t have a girlfriend because he was too busy, he needed a ghostwriter because he couldn’t pull jokes out of his forgotten childhood. 

“ _ Didn’t you… _ ” Eddie begins. “ _ I mean, didn’t you… _ ”

He can’t seem to finish his question, but Richie knows what he means, and if he can keep his mouth shut about the serious stuff that doesn’t mean he’ll stop flustering Eddie to death. “Didn’t I ever give handjobs to dudes in club bathrooms and wonder what that said about me?” he finishes, crude.

“ _ Eugh, Richie, I don’t wanna know--stop interrupting me, I was just asking if you… I mean,  _ did you _ never wonder what that said about you? Didn’t you… you know, didn’t you know? _ ”

He sounds more flustered than Richie would have thought, which he counts as a win on his end. His voice is small, his question genuine, and Richie does wonder, now, what kind of clown Eddie’s trying to kill.

“Nah, I didn’t think about it. It’s not like I didn’t have eyes, duh, I just wasn’t thinking about what it meant for me and shit. The mechanics of it.”

“ _ But now you are? _ ”

“Well, yeah, you see, me and your mother had a heart-to-heart and--”

“ _ Beep beep, Richie. _ ”

Richie laughs and complies. “Will you be at the office for long?” he asks to change the subject. He yawns. He thinks about Eddie all alone in the dark but with a series of lamps all turned in the right direction to minimize the damage the computer screen will cause to his eyes, because Eddie’s funny like that.

“ _ Yeah, _ ” Eddie sighs. “ _ Are you going to sleep? _ ”

“That was the plan.” He tries to suppress another yawn, but it comes out even wider.

As much as he loves talking with Eddie, he’s just performed a show; he’s wary, and his eyes won’t stay open for long. He wishes he could be with him even as he drifts to sleep.

“ _ Okay _ .”

“Okay.”

“ _ Okay, listen, I’m only going to ask this once and if you make fun of me I’ll murder your fucking bloodline. _ ”

“Scout’s honor.”

“ _ This place fucking creeps me out at night so can we not hang up? _ ”

Richie puts his face on the mattress and laughs quietly into it. “Sure,” he says then, still laughing into a yawn and hoping Eddie doesn’t hear it, because he’s not laughing at him but at his own situation. “I’m fucking spent, though, so I’m gonna sleep.”

“ _ Do whatever you want, I don’t care. I just want someone to hear me scream in case something tries to kill me _ .”

“That won’t look good on me when I call the police to pick up your body and they ask me how come I’m implicated in another murder, but sure, whatever you want. I’m getting into bed.” It feels weird to say it, but it would feel weirder not to notify him that Richie’s performing such an intimate gesture - getting into bed while talking with him - even though Eddie is perfectly aware that getting into bed is usually one of the steps to going to sleep at night.

“ _ Don’t care _ ,” Eddie repeats.

“Nightie-night, Eds.”

Mike said: “We talked a lot on the phone. Bill was going through his divorce and we…” and he never finished the sentence. If he had, it would have gone like this: “Bill was going through his divorce and we’d talk until he fell asleep, sometimes. He never wanted to hang up.”

“I was lonely,” Bill would have said. “And maybe I liked you. Who knows.”

Richie doesn’t know how long he sleeps, but he wakes up when Eddie murmurs, “ _ Okay, I’m gonna go home. Thanks, Rich _ .”

“You’re welcome,” he mumbles.

“ _ Shit! _ ” Eddie screams. “ _ Are you trying to murder me? I thought you were asleep! _ ”

“Just woke up.”

“ _ Fuck. How are you such a light sleeper? I was fucking  _ whispering _. _ ”

“I don’t know,” Richie says, groggy. “The fear that something will attack me while I’m sleeping?”

“ _ I would have heard you scream _ ,” Eddie says. 

It’s such a dumb way to reassure someone, and Richie loves him for it. 

His friends would argue that he’s making excuses now, too - that he’s still hiding behind a wall of egotistical selflessness instead of telling Eddie the truth. It’s ironic that the guy called Trashmouth is the one who should strive for a life where he gets to tell people what he needs to say, he recognizes that. But his freedom can’t come at Eddie’s expense. 

There was a time when all he wanted was to be at rest. He wishes he could still be the guy who doesn’t let anything concern him but he’s chosen to put Eddie first, and that means he doesn’t get to tell Eddie he loves him, for Eddie’s own sake. 

His whole life Eddie’s had to bear the weight of other people’s heavy, fucked-up love. Richie doesn’t think he loves Eddie in a fucked-up way like his mom did, but he knows he’s difficult to deal with, and he doesn’t want to give Eddie other reasons to be worried. Telling him he loves him would unnerve him. It would just make him censor himself more, look for more excuses, tiptoe around Richie’s feelings and eventually become so stressed about the state of their strained friendship he would just stop speaking to Richie altogether,

For Eddie, he’ll keep his mouth shut. He spent so much time praying to be free and now he needs to hold back, and he knows he’s dug himself a grave but he’ll stand in the dirt and he’ll find a way to make it work. Now that he’s older, he cares very little for his mind to be at peace. He wouldn’t give Eddie’s friendship up for anything in the world.

Seeing Eddie again, that night when they arrived in Derry, was like a breath of fresh air. All of a sudden, the town that ruined his life was the place where he could begin to find some happiness. That town without love gave him so much, but it still took him twenty-seven years to find out. He was alone for so long, and desolate even longer. Now things can finally go right, but he still spent almost thirty years of his life wallowing in misery, unable to breathe, trapped in himself.

He won’t tell Eddie he loves him for Eddie’s own sake, but he can still kill the clown and free his younger self from his cage.

“You know, you’re the only one who still hasn’t come to my show.”

“ _ If you extended a formal invitation I might do you a favor and come see you be actively unfunny for fifty minutes _ .”

“Actually,” Richie says. He squeezes his eyes and breathes deeply. “Maybe it’s best if you don’t come.”

“ _ What? _ ”

“Well, Eddie Spaghetti, I hope you’re ready for the least fun conversation of your life.”

“ _ Every conversation where you call me that is already the least fun conversation of my life. _ ”

“Sure, yeah, but no, for real.”

“ _ What’s going on? Is everything okay? _ ”

The concern in his tone makes Richie smile. For a long-overdue love confession, it’s anticlimactic. It took Richie the best part of a year (or maybe the best part of three decades) to wrench it out of himself, but he says it on a night like any other, in a hotel room like any other, wearing jeans under the covers because he was too tired to take them off.

“There’s a bit that’s about you. In my special. About how you were kind of my gay awakening, once or twice.”

“ _...twice? That doesn’t make any fucking sense, Richie. _ ”

“Yes it fucking does!”

“ _ You can’t wake something up twice! _ ”

“You never fucking hit snooze on your alarm? Are you some kind of robot? And why the fuck are we shouting about this, anyway?”

“ _ Because I don’t know what to say to any of the rest! I don’t know what you want me to say, like, duly noted, Richie, I don’t-- _ ”

“I don’t need you to say anything. I just wanted you to know that maybe it’s best if you don’t come unless you don’t mind hearing about it because it’s… it’s there. Anyways. Talk to you soon, Eds.”

**Eddie [8/21 - 9:22]**

It’s fine anyway.

Young Richie can breathe, then: Eddie knows, and it’s fine.

**Part two, or: The one where it’s Christmas and it’s not**

From June to December, every step Richie takes is carefully staged. He only performs in a limited number of small venues across the country,  _ as per _ the Buick metaphor. 

At the end of the summer, when his tiny little tour is done, the people at Netflix take over. They explain that they’ll begin to worry about promoting his special on their streaming service once it’s been filmed, but for now their main concern is to attract people to his live show. To do so, they dig up every inexplicable piece of news about him: that he bombed on stage for the first time in decades, that he immediately flew back to his hometown despite having sworn multiple times he’d never set foot in Maine ever again, that he killed a child murderer two days later, survived a building collapse in the company of no less than  _ three other _ moderately famous people, was trialed for murder, rented an apartment in Portland and  _ lived in Maine _ for two months, went back to California and completely disappeared. Clearly, a guy like this has some things to tell.

**Part two point one, or: the mechanics of killing clowns**

The Losers club began forming what would eventually become the official version of the story in a hospital waiting room, on green plastic chairs, in the aftermath of It’s death.

Richie sat with his elbows on his knees and his head between his arm. In those uncertain hours, the others took turns comforting him - because they had eyes and ears and hearts. As he rubbed his back with one hand, Mike motioned for the others to come closer and said, in a low tone: “Guys, we need to strategize.”

Richie snapped up. “Strategize  _ what _ ? It’s over, it’s done, it’s  _ caput _ , what else--”

“Yes, it’s done. And soon we’re going to be called in for questioning because we were inside an abandoned house when it collapsed, and the more time passes without us telling them that there’s a dead guy in the library the more suspicious we get -  _ especially _ me.”

They’d already told the first of a long series of necessary lies and omissions: that Eddie had been struck by a piece of debris as they ran out of the house on Neibolt. But there was still much work to do.

“And the timeline doesn’t head up,” Bill said. He was sitting next to Mike, and he hunched over on his chair, pensive.

“Exactly,” Mile said. “I keep thinking that there’s no way to justify why we were all in Derry around the same time Stan died and Bowers broke free when we haven’t even talked to each other in decades. Three unexplainable events all connected to us and all happening at the same time is too much of a coincidence.”

Much of Richie’s life, as it turned out, still depended on how many explanations he could pull out of his ass.

“We can’t say that we came here to mourn Stan,” Bev considered. “Even if there was no way to prove that Stan’s wife called us when we were already here, some of us were already  _ coming _ here when he passed. There’s a track record of it. Plane tickets, car rides...”

“I bombed on stage after a call,” Richie added. “My manager will testify for it if they question him. And that was before Stan died.”

“And Eddie crashed his car,” Mike supplied.

“So if we’re not careful,” Ben said. “Someone could try to argue that… what, exactly? That we suspected Bowers had broken free since the official version is that he’s responsible for It’s murders… so we all got together to kill him for vengeance? This way these two things would be connected. And Stan’s death was either a coincidence or…” He looked at Bev, unable to finish the sentence.

“Or it was influenced by our decision to come here, somehow,” she said.

“Which still wouldn’t add up.”

“No,” Mike agreed. “The truth is the only version that makes sense. But we still can’t explain why  _ I _ called you. I had no reason to call you except the  _ one _ thing we can’t talk about.”

“So what do we say?”

Ben looked at Richie, then at Bev; Bev looked at Richie and Ben; Richie looked at Bev and Ben and then Mike; Mike and Bill’s eyes were locked in a silent conversation. Mike nodded slightly, and Bill turned to the rest of the Losers.

“S-s-so we say… we say that Stan called us,” he said.

“ _ What _ ? Why would he call us?”

“We don’t know,” Mike admitted. “But there’s a lot of things we can say without actually lying if we go with this version of the story.”

Bill was nodding. “We know Stan was scared,” he said, counting on his fingers. “We know he was in a state of distress. And we know…” 

“We know that he wanted us to be together,” Bev said. “To stand together.”

“So... so he calls us, asks us to go back to Derry, then dies.”

“Because he knows what’s about to happen and he wants us to face it together.”

“I fucking hate this plan,” Richie said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I fucking hate this plan!” he repeated, though they’d all heard him perfectly.”

“I know,” Bill said. “Me too. But Stan would want us--”

“Fuck you,” Richie spatted. “It fucked with Stan’s mind so much that he fucking  _ killed _ himself, so don’t pretend--”

“Stan was the only one who remembered,” Mike said, interrupting them. “He remembered Pennywise while we were still on the phone. It took you guys  _ days _ , but he knew immediately. He always saw farther than us. The thing that killed him, the--the fact that the virus got to him sooner than it got to us, that was because he was always one step ahead of us. But that’s also what allowed him to live a happier and better life than the rest of us. And don’t even try to pretend that your lives are more adjusted than his just because you’re all famous. Maybe he didn’t remember, but he always--somehow, he always knew.”

Richie thought about Stan’s letter. He thought about Stan telling them to be proud. He must have known, somehow (he must have known because he was Stan). He thought about Stan’s Bar Mitzvah.

“If we know one thing about who Stan was as an adult,” Mike continued. “Is that he’d want to save us. So if saving us means lying about him calling us and telling us to come here, he’d tell you to shut up and get on with the plan.”

“Okay, but I want it on the record that I hate this.”

“The whole point of this is that it’s not on the record,” Ben said. Richie laughed.

“There are still a lot of holes in the story, though,” Bill considered.

“Oh, come on,” Richie said. “What are the chances that a bunch of famous people got together to Murder On The Orient Express some guy they’ve clearly all moved on from? They’ll believe us.”

“I know you don’t want to have anything to do with this, Richie, but if the police start digging they’ll find a lot of stuff we don’t want them to find, and we need to prepare for everything in case--in case you and Mike a-are alone.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“In case Eddie doesn’t wake up, Richie,” Bev said, kindly. “He’s the only other one of us who came face to face with Bowers.”

Richie got up. He went to the hospital bathroom and threw up.

Two days later, they were told that Eddie was out of danger.

In the end, it wasn’t Stan but Patricia Uris who saved them. She swore under oath that Stan called them before he died. She swore that she didn’t know what he told them, she swore that he said they were his friends.

She was allowed to go home later that week. Before she left, she called them to say goodbye. They met her at the motel where she was staying and asked her why she’d lied for them. She fixed the collar of her coat against the cold and stared at the rows of cars in the parking lot.

“I know there were parts of Stan’s life that he couldn’t share with me,” she said. “And I know that there were parts he was hiding from himself. He tried therapy, but it wasn’t working, so he gave up. We knew that there were things we might never know about him and I still loved him and trusted him. When I married him… I guess I didn’t expect to be tested. When people choose to share their life with someone they expect to face hardships, not… not tests.” She took a deep breath and looked back at them. “Choosing whether to help you or not was my test. And my choice was to trust him, even if that meant I had to lie to protect someone I don’t know. I didn’t do it blindly. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought you had anything to do with his death. But whatever the reason why he… did what he did, I know it wasn’t your fault. So, to the end, whatever happens, I will stand with my husband, and if that means taking care of you then I will.”

They thanked her even though there was no way to thank her enough. 

“We understand,” Eddie said, and Richie wondered what exactly he understood. He wondered if he felt that way about his wife, if he felt that his love had been tested. But it wasn’t just about love, not exactly - there was bravery in this, too. Patricia’s choice had been the hard one, and she’d been the one brave enough to take it.

“Can we offer you dinner?” Ben asked.

“No,” she said, not unkindly. “I’m not… I’m not ready to talk with you. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I don’t know if it would be… healthy, for me, to hang onto you. Stan and I have our own friends back home.”

“If you ever change your mind,” Bev said. “You know where to find us.”

“We all loved Stan,” Richie added, because he felt that she needed to know this. Eddie turned sharply to him, a puzzled look in his eyes and something else, something undetectable behind them, a question maybe - _ is this a joke? _ It wasn’t a joke. They all loved Stan -  _ Richie _ loved Stan. He’d gone to his Bar Mitzvah.

“Richie’s right,” Bev said. “We all love him. We’re really sorry.”

“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.” Patricia said.

She got into her car. Then she was gone.

The collapsing of the house on Neibolt was ruled as an accident. Bill declared that they’d all been inside because he’d been having a breakdown over the death of his brother. The rest of the pieces fit together better than the alternative Murder On The Orient Express plotline. It went like this: traumatized group of childhood friends receive distressing call, agrees to go back to hometown, relieves trauma that leads to William Denbrough’s breakdown, incidentally becomes the target of an  _ old acquaintance _ , Richie Tozier kills him as a desperate measure to prevent another murder after said acquaintance tries to murder at least two of them. The child murderer doesn’t get much sympathy from the jury over the popular personalities who rid the world of him. Finally, it’s over. Richie is allowed to return to California, Mike moves to Florida. Richie disappears.

In early October, less than two months before Richie’s special, Bev is a guest on  _ The Daily Show with Trevor Noah  _ to talk about an organization she co-founded with others. When the episode airs, Richie calls her on Skype to watch it together. He sets the computer on the coffee table and turns on the tv.

“We work with young victims of abuse,” Bev tells Trevor when he asks her about it. “We provide them with financial help and with a network of people who will stand by their side, and we provide them with psychological support. It’s vital that they process their trauma in healthy ways. I know from first-hand experience that without resources risks become higher. I’ve supported many causes through the years but because of my own personal history I couldn’t bring myself to work on a project like this for a very long time, and I know that part of the reason why that happened was that I was left alone, with nobody to help me work through what happened to me.”

“You recently won a trial against your ex-husband and you publicly talked about your experience as a victim of abuse both as a child and as an adult. It must have been really difficult to come forth with the full story and I really, really admire your courage and your willingness to put yourself under the spotlight so that your experience can help other people, and I’ve got to ask: how did you find that courage?”

“There’s no easy answer to that. I can’t give you a formula for freedom. But,” she said. But, as someone once said, there is a correlation between truth and violence. 

Violence is the product of a force that remains extraneous to the system in which it intervenes; it denaturalizes it, violates it, slaughters it. It doesn’t change it: instead, it deprives it of shape and meaning. Violence is a self-serving violation; it doesn’t serve truth but wants to be truth itself. And truth is, in its own way, violent: it tears the pre-established order. 

“You’ve got to accept that truth will create a laceration. And that may scare you. But the difference between truth and violence is that truth opens doors. You have to believe that good things will come out of those doors. You need a bit of faith in that.”

“ _ It’s from a book _ ,” Bev explains over Skype while Trevor talks. “ _ Mike recommended it to me _ .”

“I said it best,” Richie says with a smile. 

They both finish his line: “ _ Let’s kill this clown _ .”

In late October, Bill appears as a guest on Jon Lovett’s sociopolitical podcast and mentions Richie’s upcoming show.

“I know being  _ actually _ funny isn’t his usual deal,” he tells Jon. “But neither is saving people’s lives or doing any of the things he’s done in the past year. I know what he’s going to say in this show, and I think it’s worth being there when he says it.”

**Part two point two, or: the mechanics of coming home**

In November Richie is set to film the intro and outro of the show at Ben and Bev’s place in San Francisco. 

Technically, it’s Bev’s place. When she left her husband she refused to stay in the same city where he lived and moved to California. She kept running her business from her San Francisco offices and she found a space for herself: she joined a gym, found a bakery she loved, volunteered at a shelter, made new friends. For the first few months, Ben would only visit her: they wanted to be together, but she needed her own space to grow and she wasn’t his answer to everything. When she was ready, she asked him to join her in San Francisco.

Ben, in the meantime, started attending business meetings instead of locking himself in his lonely house in the woods. He got involved, made a point to socialize with the people around him. When Bev asked him to move in with her he opened a branch of his company in San Francisco and sold his old house. 

When Richie asked them to film at their place, they invited all the Losers for the weekend. That’s how Richie finds himself in an Uber with his team on a November afternoon - much to his distaste because he fucking hates the guys at Uber after that one time he was doing a bit on Comedy Central and he talked about taking an Uber and they threatened to sue him because “Uber is an adjective, not a noun” and Richie was, apparently, “ruining the brand image.” 

They called for a van because the girls from Netflix need some extra space for their equipment. They’re called Lexi and Stephenie; Lexi, sitting in the middle row of seats with Richie, is leaning over the backseat to talk to her colleague.

“Are we leaving the white balance on auto?”

“I think we might want to set it to incandescence,” Stephenie says. “But it depends on whether or not we want to change the settings once we move inside, because I was testing it yesterday on my sister’s, like, Pinterest lights she’s got in her room, and they didn’t render well if I used the same settings I was using outside.”

The house will be decorated for Christmas because Richie needs that for his intro. It will be released in the last days of December and Richie has this long, convoluted bit about mall Santas as a metaphor for his inability to  _ own his shit _ and also for his penchant for making “your mom” jokes instead of being frank with people. Today they’re only filming the entrance; tomorrow the girls will be back to take a few shots of the house, and on Sunday they’ll film the epilogue with Bev. She and Richie will take off the Christmas decorations, and she’ll say something about the fact that Christmas has passed to imply that Richie isn’t scared of his own feelings anymore now that the show has granted him a magical catharsis or whatever. Richie can’t believe he actually came up with that and decided it was a good idea and not, like, the cringiest full-circle bullshit ever, but it’s too late to change it.

They tell the driver to wait for them since Netflix is paying for the drive anyway. The sun is already setting, so Stephenie and Lexi quickly assemble their equipment and follow Richie as he heads to the front door, one at his left and one behind him. 

The columns on the patio are covered in holly leaves and yellow lights, and there’s a massive garland on the door. Richie shakes his hands, loosens his scarf.

“Alright, fuck it. Here goes nothing.”

He rings the doorbell. A moment later, Ben swings the door open.

“Trashmouth!”

“Heard there was a party to crash,” Richie says, and Ben doesn’t laugh because it’s not a funny joke but he smiles nonetheless. He’s wearing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on a blue jumper and what Richie  _ swears _ are velvet pants. 

“Is that the stripper I booked?” calls a voice - Bev’s - from the room at Richie’s right.

Ben braces himself on the door and leans backwards to look at her as he replies. “No, babe, it’s an ugly man!”

“I wish I could insult you back,” Richie says. “But you’re cooking me dinner tonight so maybe not.”

“Babe? I changed my mind, he can stay.”

Richie gets inside, closely followed by the cameras that the others have been instructed to ignore, even though Richie definitely sees Ben sneak a friendly wave at the girls once they’ve crossed the threshold. He finds Bev, Mike and Bill in the living room - Bev perched on the sofa, the boys standing next to her with a mug of eggnog each. In the corner of the room, the biggest Christmas tree Richie has ever seen. No sign of Eddie. To match with Ben, Bev’s jumper has a picture of Hermey the Misfit Elf. Bill has a guernsey on his shoulders, which Richie finds hilarious.

“Boy, you all look so… middle-aged,” he says.

“It’s always so good to see you,” Bev says.

“How’s it going, Richie?”

“Hey,” Bill says, and then he adds, completely unprompted, just to fuck with him: “Remember when you found a toad and picked it up and asked if anyone was going to lick it to see what toads tasted like and then you didn’t wait for an answer before licking it, and then you threw up?”

Behind Richie, Lexi snorts. 

“What happened to sticking to the script?” Richie asks with no real heat.

“What script?” Mike retorts. “You sent us a text telling us to play nice because you had to film your entrance, and you mistyped the word  _ entrance _ .”

“Don’t worry, you can cut out all of your whinings later.”

“Fuck no. This is the one time when I tell the whole fucking truth, I’m not cutting any of this out.”

“ _ Cut _ ,” Stephenie says, making Richie’s friends laugh. “Sorry. Didn’t mean… I was just thinking we could reshoot the entrance, maybe shake it up a little, see if something else comes out.”

“Alright. Tozier, you’re getting kicked out.”

It’s already dark when they get outside. Their Uber driver is still in the van, playing a game on his phone - from the looks of it, Richie’s guess is  _ Subway Surfer _ . 

Richie stares into the lens of Lexi’s camera to fix his hair - “fix” as in “run a hand through it to ruffle it”. He adjusts his scarf again, buttons his jacket, shakes his shoulders. The girls tell him to wait for them to adjust their lighting. Once they’re done, they give him the go.

“Alright, fuck it. Here--”

A car pulls up the road and he turns around at the noise. Stephenie quickly turns the camera away from Richie and toward the incoming car. Its lights blind Richie, but he doesn’t look away.

Eddie parks his rental in front of Richie’s Uber. A strange feeling of suspension wafts on the front porch; Richie, Stephenie and Lexi stand, motionless, holding their breath. It is as if life could only resume its course once Eddie’s stepped out of the car. The only sign that time is still running is the intermittent pulsing of the yellow lights wrapped around the columns. The car engine dies down. The door opens. Life begins again.

“Eddie Spaghetti!”

Eddie rolls his eyes. 

“Give a guy a  _ fucking  _ break, Richie.”

He opens the trunk to get his luggage, and Richie turns to the girls.

“You know what, the first take was good. You guys can Uber back to your hotel and I’ll see you tomorrow for the house shoot.” They look hesitant, and Lexi even tries to sneak in some sort of objection, so he adds: “I’ll make sure they still pay you in full.”

“Okay! Have a good night, then.”

“See you tomorrow, Mr. Tozier.”

They hop down the patio in the cheerful manner of everyone who’s ever been told to go home earlier. While they knock on the driver’s window to get him to unlock the doors, Eddie hauls his luggage toward the entrance. As soon as he puts it down, Richie drapes an arm around his shoulders.

“So,  _ what-is-up _ on the East Coast?”

“Peace and quiet as long as you’re West.” Then, gently: “Hi, Rich.”

It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since their very bad, very one-sided round of Two Truths One Lie back in August; they’ve texted a bit since then, but they never spoke on the phone again. But if Richie is searching for some kind of additional awkwardness in Eddie’s usual standoffish manners, he doesn’t find any.

“You missed my big entrance,” he tells him.

“I’m devastated,” Eddie deadpans.”

“Your chance at fame is gone.”

“I’m sure you can hit up a casting director for me.”

“But will I?”

He doesn’t know why Eddie hasn’t shrugged him off already, but he’s not complaining. Even in their winter coats, Eddie’s shoulders fit nicely under his arm. They smile at each other, and there’s  _ fondness _ under Eddie’s permanent frown. Richie rubs his arm before letting his hand fall. He rings the doorbell.

Ben opens the door way too soon and his  _ Trashmouth! _ definitely sounds rehearsed.

“Where are the girls?” he asks then, craning his neck, still in time to see their Uber drive away “Hey, Eddie.”

“I sent them back,” Richie says while Ben pulls Eddie into a one-armed hug that looks like the non-pining-for-your-childhood-best-friend version of the way Richie greeted him a minute ago. “You have me all for yourselves now.”

“Just what I’d been hoping,” Eddie mumbles as he makes his way inside. As much as Richie would like for him to be serious, his tone is definitely sarcastic. Ben shoots him a glance that Richie chooses to ignore.

Now that everybody’s there, they sit down for dinner. The place at the head of the table has been laid for Stan, with a menorah next to the glass.

“We know this is more, like, a Christmas-themed dinner party,” Bev explains as they find their places. “But we thought we’d celebrate Hanukkah for him while we’re at it.”

“This is fun, though, isn’t it?” Ben says. “My family never really celebrated Christmas and neither did Bev’s, so we had no idea what to do.”

“We might have gone a little overboard just to be sure.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I definitely told you I wouldn’t be filming dinner, and this feels, like, if aliens came to earth and weren’t sure what the fuck a Christmas Eve dinner was but wanted to get in on the fun.” 

“The eggnog is great, though.”

Truth be told, Richie has no idea what’s supposed to happen in a traditional, real-life Christmas dinner either, because his only experience with it comes from movies like  _ Home Alone _ . But the house looks objectively amazing, with all the candles and mistletoe and Céline Dion’s 1998 Christmas album playing in the background. The old sideboard in the dining room is decorated with thin, white branches, pinecones, and little reindeer and fawns. The only dent in the planning is that Richie’s place is the farthest from Eddie. Two glasses of wine down, Ben and Bev confess that orchestrating this dinner felt like a self-taught wedding planning crash-course.

“So, Richie,” Bill says between the appetizers and the main course. “Heard your Netflix special bombed.”

“Funny you should mention that, Big Bill, because you promoting it on that weird podcast is definitely the reason why the venue sold out.”

“You know, after we recorded the episode all the guys from the podcast came to me to ask me about you because they just couldn’t believe I was endorsing you. I…” he coughs and Mike, who’s sitting between him and Richie, pats his back. “I had to tell them I’m bisexual for them to believe me.”

Richie’s eyes shoot to Eddie, who’s gaping.

“Are you?” Eddie asks.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bill,” Bev says. “Did you come out to  _ Mia Farrow’s son-in-law _ before you came out to us?”

“ _ Wouldn’t _ you have come out to someone who’s sort-of related to  _ Mia Farrow _ first, if you had the chance?”

“ _ Touché _ .”

“Well, congratulations, man,” Eddie says. 

“Is anybody else aware that Mia Farrow said she thinks Jesus was more gay than not?” Richie asks.

“Duh,” Eddie says.

“How do  _ you _ know that?” Richie replies, delighted.

“Research.”

“Research on  _ what _ ?”

“Research on your mother, god, shut up.”

“I thought this was all about Mia Farrow being some  _ other _ guy’s mother.”

“Can you please  _ both _ shut up for once in your lives?”

“Wow, Ben. Really channeling your inner Stan right there.”

Ben lovingly pats the menorah and says he’s going to bring out the main course.

After dinner, Richie finds himself sitting on his heels between Eddie and Stan’s seats, looking up at Eddie as he talks. After a few glasses of wine and eggnog, he’s become loquacious; he’s getting worked up about something, all cranky and fiery as usual, and he’s slapping the side of his hand on his palm to emphasize a point. It’s the first time in six months that Richie sees him; part of him, inside, is laughing, because all he can think as he looks at him is  _ I love you _ .

“Time for a board game!” Bev says once Ben has cleared the table.

“Wow, Bev, we’re really going  _ all _ in, aren’t we?” 

“Yeah, just like me and--”

“I’ll kill your fucking knees!” Eddie growls, making a curt movement with his foot in the direction of Richie’s legs as if he wanted to kick him. 

Richie thinks his knees might actually be dead already, considering he’s been in that position for at least fifteen minutes. He stands up, with considerable difficulty, just in time to see Bill and Mike slide over to let him occupy Bill’s seat in front of Eddie. Mike shakes his head at him with a smile and Richie flips him the bird as he massages his knees.

“What are we playing?”

“Ben is getting  _ Clue _ .”

Richie cranes his neck in the direction of the living room. “Is it because it takes place inside a house, Haystack?  _ Is it _ ?”

“Maybe,” Ben concedes with a smile as he returns with the board.

“Are we seriously playing a game where the goal is… finding a murderer?” 

“Yeah, it’s a nice change of pace, isn’t it?” Bev says cheerfully. She dispenses the player tokens randomly, and Eddie scoffs when he gets the yellow token.

“I don’t want to be Colonel Mustard,” he says. “Richie, let’s swap characters.”

“I would, but your irritable personality suits your small figure and I think you could only  _ swap characters _ in an episode of  _ Star Trek _ .” The joke is strained at most, but Richie is distracted by Eddie’s hand already seizing the token that Richie is holding. For a moment, they wrestle for it.

“What the fuck--that’s the least funny joke you’ve ever made, dipshit, just let me have that.”

Richie finally lets go of Miss Scarlet and snatches Colonel Mustard before Eddie decides to hold onto both just to spite him. 

“Are you guys done fighting?” Bill asks. 

“Never,” Richie replies with ease. Eddie kicks him under the table.

They divide the cards into three piles - people, rooms and weapons - and they choose a card from each pile to hide in the _Case File CONFIDENTIAL_ envelope; Bev distributes the rest, which they’ll need to figure out by process of elimination what’s in the envelope.

“Which character goes first?” Bill asks.

“Miss Scarlet,” Mike says. Eddie has the decency of shooting Richie a sheepish glance, since having stolen his token means that Richie is now last. Richie grins at him and Eddie rolls his eyes - then he rolls the dice.

He moves into a room and makes the first Suggestion - “I suggest that the crime was committed in the Lounge by Mr. Green with the Candlestick.”

When it’s Richie’s turn, he moves Colonel Mustard into the Dining Room and says: “I suggest that the crime was committed in the Kitchen by Mrs. Peacock with the Wrench.” He actually has both the Kitchen card and Mrs. Peacock. Eddie, who’s technically the player at his left and should, therefore, show him one of the cards Richie asked for, if he has any, tells him he’s got nothing to give him; Ben tells him the same, then Bev, then Mike; Richie almost thinks he’s hit the jackpot, but then Bill slides a card over to him and lets him take a peek at his Wrench, which Richie would make a joke about if not for the fact that he’d be giving everybody else his own clue.

The second round begins. Richie notices that Ben is making tiny annotations in his detective pad whenever a Suggestion is made. Bill has built his barricade all wrong, and Richie can see everything he’s written in his pad whenever he leaves it on the table, but he pretends not to notice. He also pretends not to notice and Mike and Bill’s knees are pressed together. Eddie is shuffling his cards after showing one to Ben and he keeps changing their placement in the deck, following a logic that Richie will never know. Bev is leaning backwards on her chair to try and see Ben’s cards before she makes her Suggestion. Ben notices and puts his cards down with a shocked face, and Bev kisses his cheek lightly. Richie loves them all so much. He can’t stop smiling, and his eyes are stinging.

“Hey, Ben,” Eddie calls. “Is there ragweed in this area?”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Does this room face north?”   
“No, man, but why?”

Eddie shakes his head curtly. As Bev rolls the dice, he looks pointedly at his own cards, which Richie has absolutely no qualms with because that means he gets to look at him while he tries to figure out why he’d ask such arbitrary questions. He watches him scratch underneath his earlobe. His fingernails are polished neatly, and there is light, fine hair on the back of his hand. One of the buttons on his shirt cuff is undone. Ragweed and mold, which develops more on the north side of houses due to a lack of direct sunlight, are two of the main causes of allergies in the fall. But Eddie never backs down from the chance of giving a tirade, while now he literally refused to give Ben an explanation, which still doesn’t make sense. 

Until it does, because watery eyes are a symptom of allergy, and Richie’s eyes were glossy from looking at his friends right when Eddie asked Ben about ragweed.

It’s Richie’s turn. He moves his token to the kitchen.

“I accuse,” Richie says, and you only make an Accusation at the end of the game. “I accuse Mrs. Peacock of committing the crime in the Kitchen with the Lead Pipe.”

Since he’s made the Accusation he gets to check the envelope, and if he’s wrong he’s out of the game and all the other players can see his cards. He knows he’s wrong because he’s holding Mrs. Peacock in his hand.

“You can’t have the answer already,” Ben says.

“Sure do, you misbeliever.”

“It’s the second fucking round!”

Richie sticks his tongue out and takes the envelope from the center of the board. He looks through the cards and finds that he actually got the room right.

“Oops,” he says. “I must have made a mistake. My bad! What happens now?”

“According to the rulebook, this means that you’re out of the game because the murderer has killed you,” Mike tells him. “This isn’t awakening any traumatic memories at all!”

“So what now?” Bev asks.

“Oh, it’s no problem. I’ll watch Eddie Spaghetti play.”

“Screw you,” Eddie says, but he makes everyone scoot to the left so Richie can fit next to him.

“Stan the Man, I’m borrowing your chair.”

“No cheating allowed,” Bev warns him. He crosses his heart.

It’s Eddie’s turn, and Richie suggests he mention two cards he has and one he doesn’t. “No cheating,” Bill reminds him. Eddie tells him he’s not accepting any advice from him. The following turn, he does exactly as Richie said.

“This has nothing to do with you,” he mumbles in Richie’s direction, not quite looking at him. “I’ve come to a  _ separate _ conclusion that this is a good strategy.”

“Mhm,” Richie concurs, voice low, and Eddie blushes. Richie wonders what would happen if he put his hand on Eddie’s cheek and kissed him right then, or if he just put his hand on his cheek and asked him to repeat,  _ this has nothing to do with you, I’ve come to a  _ separate _ conclusion that this is a good strategy _ . 

When Eddie’s down to just a few guesses, Richie watches him ponder his notes carefully, tap his pencil on his detective pad and draw a squiggly line connecting all the weapons. He leans in.

“ _ Bill has the Wrench _ ,” he whispers in his ear. 

“No cheating!” Bill and Mike yell.

“I told Eddie he looks hot when he’s focusing!” 

They buy it on the spot.

“Oh, okay,” Mike says.

Richie pinches Eddie’s cheek for good measure and Eddie slaps his hand away. His eyes are squeezed shut, his frown deeper than usual, and for a moment Richie thinks he’s crossed some kind of line. Was it the compliment, the pinching, or the fact that nobody batted an eye? But then Eddie’s foot finds Richie’s and gives it a kick. So it’s all right.

Despite Richie’s best efforts, Ben still wins the game. It was Ben who chose it so they all pretend to complain he rigged it, especially Eddie, who has no business getting so heated since he’s the one who actually cheated. In the very middle of their argument, Ben says he won’t get the Bailey’s if they keep whining. Richie puts a hand in front of Eddie’s mouth to shut him up, without touching him, because he doesn’t think he could stand feeling Eddie’s lips against his fingers. Ben gets the Bailey’s.

“Cheers,” Bev says once their glasses are full.

“Wait,” Mike says. “Before the toast, Bill and I have an announcement to make.”

Bill smiles at him, then winks at Richie. 

“I’m--I’m moving to Florida to work on a project with Mike.”

Eddie’s looking at them with anticipation. He’s holding his glass with both hands, tense. Richie rests his arm on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Mike laugh. “And the project is our relationship.”

“Guys, that’s fantastic!” Ben squeals.

“A toast to Bike!” Richie proposes, raising his drink.

Eddie looks at him when they clink their glasses together, and he’s smiling, but he’s guarded. Richie resists the urge to move his hand just slightly to tousle his stupid perfect hair, which has no business looking that good at eleven in the night, and to ask him if everything’s alright. 

They wrap the night not long after that because Richie was right - they’re middle-aged. Ben and Bev have two guest rooms, and Richie graciously lets Eddie take the second one and says that the sofas look more comfortable than his own bed anyway. He waits for everyone to disappear into their rooms before changing into sweatpants and a t-shirt. 

Ben told him he could use their bathroom, and Richie’s tempted to barge in on them and brush his teeth with them like a kid getting ready for bed with his parents. Instead, he searches for the basement bathroom.

He’s been here before, and he’s always loved coming here. It looks like a place where someone  _ lives _ . As much as it’s been tidied up, there’s always a book on a chair or a purse on a shelf or a lonely sock on the basement stairs. 

If Richie knows anything about homes, it’s whatever he’s learned from looking at this house. They’re not built on fucking hopes and dreams, they’re built on accidents. That’s what Ben’s house lacked before, that’s what his own apartment in Los Angeles lacks, even with the overflowing laundry baskets (plural) and the framed vintage  _ Ghostbusters _ poster that screams  _ Richie Tozier _ . He doesn’t think it’s about hopes and dreams; he thinks it’s about finding out that you have a  _ juicer _ , now, and you didn’t buy nor did you receive it as a gift, but it’s your juicer nonetheless, and it’s occupying a lot of space in your cabinets and you don’t even know how to use it, at first, because it’s just a juicer that stumbled into your life when someone else brought it with them, but by all means it’s your juicer too and you don’t have to worry about asking to borrow it - it’s yours, it’s yours, you get to have one thing, you get to breathe, you’re home.

Their whole lives were model houses before Derry, and it’s no wonder they crumbled after. They were all trapped in their personal torture chambers, suffocating inside their minds because all the doors were locked and they were stuck in a room that got smaller and smaller as they tried to grow. Richie was a puppet, a shell of a man, chained in front of a door that read,  _ Very Scary! _ , thirty years spent staring at it, unaware that he had hands to pick the locket and get in instead of wondering what was behind it, or a lighter to burn it down, should he have the balls to do so. 

The model houses are crumbling down and Richie’s happy that Ben and Bev and Mike and Bill get to live in those places where you find a single sock on the stairs and too many mismatched knick-knacks on the shelves and CDs that shouldn’t belong to you but that you can listen to anyway, and CDs that belong to you and that you hear playing when you get home even though you’re not the one who decided to put them on. Richie doesn’t get to have that, and he wonders if Eddie ever feels the same, ever feels like something’s missing. It doesn’t have to be  _ Richie _ , Richie’s used to  _ not _ being the one who’s missing, but he wonders if they share that - that loneliness, that emptiness, that  _ nothingness _ Richie feels when he sees his own apartment and knows that he wouldn’t give a shit if he had to move tomorrow. 

He’s lonely without his friends, he’s lonely without Eddie, he wonders if he’ll ever feel less lonely in the half-life he’s built for himself. He’s taking a risk with his special and he has faith that good things will come out of that laceration of the status quo, but he knows that his sexuality is not a tool to freedom. There’s more to do if he wants to kill the clown.

When he gets back to the main floor he finds Eddie in the kitchen, drinking chamomile at the counter. His mug recites, black on white:  _ YODA OBI WAN FOR ME _ . He’s wearing checked pajama pants, blue and red. 

“Cute pants. Are the tangerines in season already?” Richie asks, getting one from the fruit bowl in front of Eddie and sitting on a stool next to him, angling his body toward him.

“The fuck would I know?” Eddie growls. “Probably, actually. Tangerines are in season from late October.”

Richie peels it. He tries to do it without ripping the skin, but gives up halfway through and tears it apart. Eddie scoffs. Richie picks at a white filament, then puts the slice between his teeth and sucks the juice out because he wants to see if he can do it without spilling it. Eddie is sitting straight, focused on his mug, but when he looks at him at the corner of his eye Richie makes a big show of licking the juice off his fingers and he’s awarded with Eddie’s blush.

He pops another slice into his mouth. “So. Maybe you can show me around when I come to New York.”

Eddie puts his mug down and looks at him. “When are you coming?”

“In two weeks, so I can rehearse for a full week before the show.”

Eddie nods. “Where are you staying?”

He reaches out to steal a slice of tangerine, and Richie does nothing to stop him.

“Oh, I don’t know yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no rush,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll find someplace.”

“Yeah, but if you keep postponing and then you book last minute you won’t find anywhere half decent.”

“I’ll risk not meeting your standards. Wouldn’t be the first time anyway.” He peels another white filament and tries to do the trick again, but he bites too hard on the slice and gets tangerine juice on his hands and chin.

“You’re disgusting. You should stay at my place when you come to New York.”

“On God?”

“Yeah, fuckface, on God, just stay at my apartment. I have work so I can’t play tourist with you but there’s no reason for you to get a hotel when I live there.”

“Cool. Thanks! Where’s your apartment exactly?”

“I’m staying in Brooklyn. You couldn’t pay me to live in Manhattan.”

“That’s okay. It’s my second favorite part of the city.” Richie flashes him a smile and throws the last slice of tangerine at him.

“What the fuck, asshole!”

“Oh, no, small pieces of fruit! My greatest weakness!”

“It could have gotten into my eye! Do you know what citric acid does to your eyes! It can burn the epithelium and cause burning fucking pain!” At the end of his fit, Eddie sips his chamomile. “Anyways, why is Brooklyn your second favorite part of the city?”

Richie hops off his stool to pick up the fruit slice from the floor and eat it. “Because the Upper East Side is the first.”

“Richie. You are not allowed to base your judgment of New York neighborhoods on what you saw on  _ Gossip Girl _ .”

“How do you know about it?”

“I did some work for the guy who played... Ruphus Humphrey? He even took me out to dinner.”

“ _ You had dinner with the original DILF? _ ” Richie yells.

“He wasn’t even--”

“ _ Can you girls stop fucking shouting? _ ” Bev shouts from inside her bedroom.

Richie puts a finger to his lips and wiggles his eyebrows at Eddie.

“Real talk,” he whispers. “Who do you think we’d be on  _ Gossip Girl _ ?”

“A side character’s high school friends who show up for a single episode and have their night ruined by the main characters trying to manipulate each other,” Eddie immediately replies, and Richie laughs.

Eddie half-heartedly flips him the middle finger and drinks his chamomile. Richie looks around the kitchen, at the empty plates and pans in the dishwasher and the hot chocolate mugs in the sink and the mistletoe on the cooker hood. Eddie hums something, and Richie smiles when he realizes it’s one of the songs from the Céline Dion album they were playing at dinner.  _ Cute _ .

He throws the tangerine peels in the trash and goes up to Eddie.

“ _ This is the night before _ ,” he sings. “ _ And in my heart there is no doubt-- _ ”

“They’re  _ sleeping _ , asshole.”

He takes Eddie’s hands and spins him on the stool so that they’re facing each other. He takes another step forward. He’s barely holding Eddie’s fingers, grip loose in case Eddie wants to pull away, but Eddie doesn’t let go. His warm palms are pressed against the back of Richie’s fingers. 

“Will you give me this dance, madame?” he asks, and kisses one of Eddie’s hands with a loud, cheerful smack.

His heart sinks when Eddie pulls away as if he’d been burned.

“In your dreams,” he says, and his tone is nonchalant, but there’s distress in his eyes.

“Your loss. Goodnight, Spaghetti Head.”

“You calling me that right before going to sleep is just making your chances of not waking up tomorrow higher,” Eddie grumbles after him.

“I’ll take those chances.”

Richie settles under the blanket that Ben prepared for him and turns off the lamp. 

A few minutes later, Eddie comes into the living room and stops there. Richie can hear him inhale deeply and sharply. He pretends to be asleep. 

Maybe he’s destined to fuck up whenever Eddie gets closer to him. He’ll overestimate the distance between them and crash, and it will be fine, tomorrow, like nothing ever happened, but he doesn’t know how long it will take for him to go just a little too far. 

And maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if he told Eddie he loves him. Maybe he should take the dive instead of patiently mourning for tomorrow, but he doesn’t have it in him to give up what little he has just for the chance that Eddie may not mind. 

**Part three, or: The one Richie has his big break, Eddie has a breakdown, and a few things break**

In November, Richie flies out to New York.

When he comes out of Arrivals, Eddie is sitting on a bench at Arrivals at LaGuardia. He sees Richie, he gets up, he greets him with a one-armed hug that  _ suspiciously _ looks like Ben’s we’re-friends-and-I’m-not-pining-after-you hugs, and he pushes a donut with chocolate icing into Richie’s hand.

“Not a word,” he says. 

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Richie replies, since  _ not a word _ never worked on him.

“I knew you’d be hungry when you landed but if we stop at a cafe we’ll have to hit the road at rush hour. Come on, move your ass.”

As he listens to Eddie bitch about rush hour and the donut he got him, Richie knows he’s beyond fucked. It’s only a matter of time before he crashes and burns.

**Saturday**

Eddie’s apartment is boring. 

It’s a small place: the living room is on the left, the kitchen on the right, separated only by a counter; a corridor leads from the living room to the bedroom and the bathroom. But that’s not what makes it boring. The sofa looks comfortable, at least, but the rest of the apartment is beige and bare and it looks like the kind of place where someone with no personality would live, but Richie knows that’s not the case.

“It’s a sofa bed,” Eddie says, following his gaze. There are sheets and blankets on the coffee table in front of it; they’ll have to move it to make space for the bed. 

“So how did you get this place?” Richie asks while he snoops around. Maybe he shouldn’t judge it for its lack of personality, since his own apartment looks like a Richie Tozier tribute museum and is equally as boring.

“I’m renting it from a colleague, actually,” Eddie says. “I didn’t want to go through the hassle of looking for one.” He’s following Richie closely, a concerned frown on his face as if he were scared Richie will break something, but he lets him pick every room apart - at least until he snaps and says: “Aren’t you going to make fun of my cushions or something?”

“Okay, yeah, sure, uh… silk is a dumb material except when your mom and I have sex on silk sheets. That work?”

Eddie shrugs. “Whatever. I’m gonna make dinner. You should shower, you stink of airport sweat.”

Richie smells his armpits and complies.

When he reemerges from the bathroom, Eddie is making pasta. Richie opens every single one of his cabinets, finds tomato sauce and capers, and decides to make some sauce. When Eddie sees what he’s doing, he steps aside to give him some space in front of the cooker, looking at him like he’s expecting some kind of trick. But Richie just makes his sauce and makes a point of looking as inconspicuous as possible because he knows that will just make Eddie more suspicious.

“You know how to  _ cook _ ?” Eddie asks.

“Yeah, 'cause I’m an alive forty-one-year-old man.”

“Barely.”

“Okay, well, yes, surprisingly, I know how to cook.”

Eddie looks at him like he’s an alien for the next hour.

They take a walk after dinner because Richie needs to stretch his old-man legs after the flight. It’s a cold November night so they wrap themselves up in their scarves and Eddie wears a hat, gloves and wool socks. Richie makes fun of him for a while and Eddie bickers back at him. 

When they get down on the street, Richie drops their fake argument as easily as he started it, distracted by the display window of a home improvement store.

“Look.” He points at a wooden sign that says  _ MAN CAVE RULES _ . “You should buy that. Oh, wait, nevermind, rule number six is  _ Bitching is not allowed _ .”

“Yeah, ‘cause then I’d have to kick you out of the house and you’d have to sleep on the street.”

Richie beams at him. “I’d just steal those wool socks and I’d be fine.”

“They wouldn’t even fit you, your proportions are all wrong.”

“Yeah, especially my--”   
"No,” Eddie says, leaving Richie where he is to stalk down the sidewalk. 

Richie laughs and catches up with him.

Eddie lives in a nice area, with low red brick buildings and none of the glamour you see on tv. It’s right next to one of the main roads, and when Eddie sees him craning his neck to look around he informs him that it’s only twenty minutes from where he works - fifteen if other people knew how to drive. Richie doesn’t pin him as a reckless driver, but he bets he’s one of those people who always drive at the exact speed limit and say things like  _ I’m not reckless, I know exactly what I’m doing _ \- careful but just careless enough to make you fight the instinct to hold onto the handle.

When Richie slows down to peek into a garden because he thinks he’s seen a dog Eddie tells him that, if his plan was to take a walk, then he should walk instead of stopping by anything even remotely interesting. However, when Richie takes a five-minute pause to ogle at pastry on display in a bakery Eddie puts his face near the glass, too. He rolls his eyes when Richie wiggles his eyebrows at his reflection. 

“So, how long did you live in New York?” Eddie asks at some point as they’re walking.

“Like, a year?” Richie says as he admires the cakes on display inside a bakery. “Did you read it on my Wikipedia page?”

“Yeah, Richie, I read your Wikipedia page, ‘cause that would be such an interesting activity. I knew that already, dumbass, I--I saw you perform once, actually.”

They stop at a crossroad and Richie turns to him, surprised. Eddie is staring straight ahead.

“You saw me perform in 2004?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, voice muffled by his scarf.

Richie shoves his shoulder lightly. “Was it before or after your wedding?”

Finally, Eddie looks at him - to glare at him. “ _ After _ ,” he says. “I was out with colleagues and we ended up at a bar where people were doing stand-up. I remember--I couldn’t recognize you, obviously, you know that, but…”

“Did you like my jokes?”

“No. I wasn’t even listening to you. I was just trying to figure out where I’d seen you before.”

The light turns green, but Richie doesn’t move. Eddie gets to the middle of the road before he realizes that Richie hasn’t followed him and raises his hands in a silent question before coming back to him.

“Hello? Did you die standing up?”

Richie looks at him - at his thin mouth and doe eyes. He would have never thought about it if Eddie hadn’t brought it up but he remembers now. He remembers seeing Eddie at that bar. He can’t quite make out his face in the haze of old memories, but he remembers the guy who didn’t laugh once during his entire routine but still stared straight at him from the moment he stepped on stage to the moment he stepped off. He remembers how badly he needed that stranger to stay focused on him. The idea of love at first sight never crossed his mind - rightfully so, maybe, because that hadn’t been first sight by a long shot, but after the show he searched for him in the bar, heart racing, even though he clearly hadn’t been a fan of his jokes. 

He was as upset not to find him as he’d been relieved to see him. He didn’t understand - he couldn’t have - but the stranger reminded him of something or someone he’d been searching for so long he’d forgotten what it was. For the first time in his adult life he could see, so clearly, that something was missing. For the first time, he felt awake - his senses alert, his eyes scouring the crowd. He’d woken from a dream to be in another dream where the pieces didn’t fit and the edges were jagged and his heart resonated like a drum.

But the stranger was gone. Richie got drunk, and by the end of the night he was getting a handjob in a bathroom stall by another stranger and wondering why his mind felt so bleary. By the next morning, his memories were already hazy.

“Richie? Rich? Are you actually fucking dead?” Eddie is asking, waving a hand in front of his face. The streetlight is red again.

“I started working with a ghostwriter that year,” Richie says just to say something, because he’s still struck by the realization that he’d known. He couldn’t piece it together but he’d glimpsed at the picture on the back of the box and for a brief night he’d seen what was missing. “So I guess 2004 was a year of bad decisions for both of us.”

Eddie frowns. “Yeah, it was. And I could tell that the jokes weren’t yours. I remember… it was like it was on the tip of my tongue, you know? I fucking… I was sure I’d figure it out at some point and I was so mad that I never did.” He looks like he’s still mad, either at himself or at the clown who prevented him from figuring it out, and Richie smiles.

“Some people did figure it out,” he tells him. “That my jokes weren’t true, I mean, except the ones about me and your mom.”

The light turns green again, and this time Richie is the first to cross to make up for last time. 

“Yeah, fuck off,” Eddie says, catching up with him. “I remember one time I saw someone on Twitter say that you probably didn’t even write your own material.”

“Was it a lesbian from L.A.?”

“Maybe?”

“How did you find that Twitter thread?”

Eddie glares at him. “I Googled you.”

“So you did read my Wikipedia page.”

“No!” Eddie says, and he’s not even trying to make it sound like he’s not lying. Richie laughs, and he follows.

When they’re back home, Eddie pours them drinks. Richie flops down on the sofa and ungraciously accepts the glass that Eddie hands him; Eddie pushes him to the side of the sofa and sits down next to him.

“What the fuck are we drinking?”

“Prosecco?”

“ _ Prosecco _ ... Just say  _ white wine  _ like us normal people.”

“Don’t you live in California?”

“Yes, Eds, but I live under a rock.”

“I can tell.” He glances at Richie and then quickly looks away. “Are you going to play tourist tomorrow?”

“Why, do you have better plans?”

“No, I’m saying you should. But I can’t come with you.”

“You’re fucking boring, Eds. Don’t you want to laugh at fossils with me?”

“If I wanted to laugh at fossils I’d watch you complain that you have to bend down to tie your shoes.” Eddie blushes as if he were unsure of his own joke. “And I said I can’t come.”

“Well, if you can’t come there are lots of pills that can help you with--”

“Beep beep, Richie! I can’t come because I had an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“An  _ I’ve got to go to Ikea _ kind of emergency.”

Richie gasps. “Do you think I’d pass an opportunity to see you at  _ Ikea _ ?” he asks, looking straight into Eddie’s eyes like a kid looks at the tree in his living room on Christmas Eve. “What are we buying?”

“I hate you. I… my closet broke.”

“Your  _ closet _ ?”

“I put too much weight on a shelf and now it’s in fucking pieces. I need a new one like yesterday and Sunday’s my only day off, so yeah, I’m going to Ikea to buy a closet. Are you coming or not?”

“Eddie. I would come with you to the end of the world. Ikea is just one step further.”

**Sunday**

Eddie yells at people on the road and in the Ikea parking lot, but once they’re inside the store he’s uncharacteristically silent. He only vaguely glares at Richie when he gets a map and steals about a thousand pencils from the dispenser. People keep knocking into their cart, shoving their shoulders, blocking their way by parking their cart sideways. Eddie is fuming, but he’s quiet. 

“How are you holding it together?” Richie asks when they’re literally stuck in traffic, looking up from the map where he’s drawn a stick-Eddie in a cape making his way through the crowd with a sword. 

“I got banned from another Ikea for shouting at children.”

“You shouted at  _ children _ ?”

“They were stealing directly from my cart! And fuck you,” he adds, which gets him a deathly glare from a father passing by with his daughter. “Get off your fucking high horse,  _ you _ shouted at a child.”

“Yeah, when I thought that child was the spawn of satan!”

“Well, the difference here is that those children were actually the spawn of satan.”

They eat Swedish meatballs at the restaurant - or, rather, Richie gets the meatballs and Eddie eats a salad but eats Richie’s food anyway. Then something possesses them and the next thing they know they’re back in the parking lot with paper napkins, an anti-adherent pan, a fake potted plant and a set of glasses. Eddie is frowning.

“I don’t have any space in my cabinets for another six glasses. Why the fuck did I buy these?”

“I think I blacked out between the restaurant and your car.”

“What the fuck am I going to do with these, Richie?”

“I’ll take them back with me to Los Angeles.”

He didn’t buy them and they weren’t a gift, but they’re his anyway. He might cry if they break on the plane.

**Monday**

Richie lets Eddie drag him out of bed to have breakfast together even though he won’t be going to work for another five hours. He is delighted to discover that Eddie is a morning person; while Richie slumps through the kitchen with a perpetual yawn and a jumper worn backward, Eddie paces through the room talking at full speed, drinks his coffee and fixes his hair in front of the mirror at the entrance all at the same time. He complains that it’s Richie’s fault that he’s in a hurry but never explains how or why.

After he’s gone off to work Richie gets bored in about ten minutes and decides to go out for another walk. He changes his plans as soon as he’s out on the streets and in front of the home improvement store still proudly displaying the  _ MAN CAVE RULES _ wooden sign. He goes in.

He comes out twenty minutes later with a doormat that says  _ HI, I’M MAT _ . He goes back to Eddie’s apartment, picks up Eddie’s plain brown doormat and lays down the new one in its place; he leaves the old one right inside the door in case Eddie wants to wipe his shoes twice, and also in case he doesn’t actually own it and has to return it when he moves.

That night rehearsal runs later than scheduled, and also later than expected by everyone who knew they would not end up following any kind of schedule because Richie is filming a Netflix show by the end of the week. Eddie’s house is almost an hour from the theatre and Richie prays that Eddie never finds out how inconvenient it is for him to stay at his place instead of booking a hotel five minutes away. When he gets back, the lights are off and the door of Eddie’s bedroom is closed. Eddie left him dinner in Tupperware containers.

**Tuesday**

For the first time in, most likely, their entire adult lives, Richie gets up before Eddie. The door of his bedroom is still closed and he doesn’t hear any sounds coming from inside, but he still doesn’t dare to switch on the lights. In the dark he puts on sweatpants, a jumper, his shoes, and his jacket; he makes sure his wallet is still in the left pocket. He quietly slips out of the apartment.

He gets pastries from the bakery they saw on Saturday as a thank you for last night’s dinner and comes back as quickly as he can, hoping to leave them on the kitchen table and slip into bed as if nothing happened and the box just materialized there,  _ oh, how weird, no, I had nothing to do with that _ . But Eddie is already awake and dealing with the coffee machine.

“I thought you’d been eaten by sewer rats,” he says in lieu of a  _ good morning _ .

“They’d never eat me, we’re friends.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

Eddie is forcefully punching the coffee machine with a finger. Nothing’s happening.

“Fuck you!” he yells at it.

Richie grins. “So, Eddie Spaghetti. How are your blood sugar levels?”

“What?” Eddie says, turning to him with a frown. The coffee machine suddenly springs to life and he closes his eyes in a moment of exhaustion.

“I got breakfast,” Richie explains. He presents Eddie with the box the way a fancy waiter would hand him a glass of champagne.

“Oh my god, Richie, why did you buy these?” Eddie asks, a panicked look in his eyes as he accepts the box and puts it on the counter. “They’re probably chock full of palm oil. Does that one have almonds?”

Richie breathes out in relief because he was already regretting his entire gesture at Eddie’s shocked  _ why did you buy these? _ , like maybe it was too unreasonable for him to wake up early just to buy breakfast as a thank you gift for Eddie’s thoughtfulness, like that thoughtfulness should have gone unmentioned because unreserved kindness implies some kind of affection that they refuse to acknowledge. 

“So no nut allergy?” he asks.

“Almonds are not nuts, they’re drupes. Also, the nut allergy was made up.”

That night Richie comes back earlier and finds Eddie still up, working at his laptop at the kitchen table. His dinner is, once again, in Tupperware containers that Richie heats up while Eddie keeps typing intently. 

He wonders how often Eddie works after-hours. It can’t be healthy for him, but Richie is pretty sure that Eddie knows that already, and his own rehearsal keeps running overtime because he should have been here at least a week ago and now he only has three days left before the special. When he’s done eating dinner, however, he looks up, takes note of the bags under Eddie’s eyes, and stretches his arm to slap the laptop shut.

“Wanna watch a movie?”

Eddie lets out a  _ fuck you _ before he says yes.

Richie strips the sheets off his bed and folds it back into a sofa while Eddie turns on the tv and flips through the channels. They settle for a period piece that looks like it’s going to require no thought whatsoever, but they missed the first forty-five minutes so they still spend a good chunk of time trying to piece together what’s happening. 

Richie keeps stealing glances at Eddie. His eyes are fixed on the screen, unmoving; he’s tapping a finger on his leg. His mind is clearly somewhere else, and Richie decides to put an arm on his shoulder to distract him. He puts his entire weight onto him and Eddie doesn’t even react.

“Earth to Eddie, earth to Eddie.”

“I’m watching the movie.”

“So, like, how stressed are you from one to ten?”

Eddie turns to look at him - Richie’s arm is still on his shoulder and Eddie digs his chin into it. 

“That depends on whether you keep talking over it,” he says. He’s glaring at Richie, yet he’s still letting him touch him. His chin is hurting Richie’s arm a little, but if that’s Eddie’s strategy to get him to pull away then it’s failing entirely.

“Do you want some hot chocolate?” Richie proposes.

“I don’t have any.”

He grins. “I do. I brought some with me because I knew you’re a boring man.”

Eddie shoves him lightly with both hands on the side of his chest, and Richie drops his arm from his shoulder. “Fuck you, I’m not boring.”

“You’re the most boring man I know,” Richie says in a sweet voice as he gets up to rummage through his luggage that he left on the side of the sofa.

“I won’t drink anything that’s been inside your luggage,” Eddie says. “I bet you don’t even know what scent bags are, there’s probably mold in there.”

“Won’t be too different than your dick, then,” Richie says cheerfully, fishing two packets of instant hot chocolate from a pocket. “Weren’t you watching the movie?”

“I would if you stopped annoying me.”

Once he’s made their drinks and come back to the living room, he knocks the top of Eddie’s head with a mug and passes it to him. He puts his own mug on the floor, settles back onto the sofa and gets his duvet to use it as a blanket while they watch the movie. Eddie immediately tries to steal some for himself, but Richie grips it tight and sticks his tongue out, opening his mouth entirely, gross and childish just to see him scrunch his nose and put a hand in front of Richie’s mouth in a lanky, half-hearted attempt at making him stop. 

Eddie initially ignores the mug sitting between his hands, but after five minutes he tentatively lifts it up to his lips, crouching down as if he wanted to hide from Richie’s sight.

“It’s already getting cold,” he comments.

“I thought you didn’t even like it, but hey, I’m glad you’re warming up to it.”

“Was that a joke on--how are you employed as a comedian?”

Richie pretends to slap the bottom of Eddie’s mug and in turn Eddie snatches most of his blanket. Richie shrieks.

“Traitor!”

“If you spill chocolate on the sofa you’re cleaning it!”

“That’s so cute, Eds, you trust me with cleaning the sofa?”

“Just fucking drink that, asshole.”

By the end of the movie, they’ve drifted together. Richie’s arm is around Eddie’s shoulders, Eddie’s head resting over his heart. Richie can feel Eddie breathing against his side, the rise and fall of his chest next to his own.

Another week and then he goes back to Los Angeles. When they were kids and things were easy they’d do this every other weekend, but now he recognizes the frailty of these moments. He doesn’t know if they’ll ever do any of this again. He’s made peace with his own desperation but there’s a loneliness in him that a couple of hours spent huddled together under a blanket can’t satiate.

Every minute that passes in silence is a minute closer to the moment he’ll say goodbye, and maybe if he just said something then he wouldn’t have to turn away but he knows how quick Eddie can be to pull away. He’s not a cold person, but he needs to go at his own pace. So Richie holds him tight but remains still to avoid drawing attention to the warmth pooled between their bodies, to the closeness of their faces, to the places where they’re touching. Eddie’s knitted jumper is rough under his hand, and of things were different he’d brush his shoulder with his thumb, but he’ll take what he can get and he won’t complain.

“My company is throwing a party on Thursday,” Eddie mumbles out of nowhere, voice kneaded. “You could come with me.”

“Only if I get to wear the ugliest suit I own,” Richie says.

“Deal. Jesus Christ, how late is it?”

Eddie bitches about having to leave the sofa for a while. Then he leaves.

**Wednesday - or Thursday, depending on how you see it**

As usual, rehearsal runs well over time. When Richie comes home he finds Eddie asleep on the sofa bed with TLC still on.

He has dinner, cleans the dishes, brushes his teeth, gets changed for bed. He hopes Eddie will hear him and wake up, but he’s fast asleep. He fucks around with his phone for a while, but it’s getting almost comically late and he’s got a party tonight and a show tomorrow, so this is not the right time to pull all-nighters. 

Eventually, he gives up and decides that if that’s how it is, then tonight they’re switching beds. 

He’s only been in Eddie’s room once, last Sunday, when they built the closet. He doesn’t even want to delve into the irony of that. Instead, he flops onto his best friend’s bed and submits to the fact that he’ll have to sleep in his jumper because if he got under the covers there would be no coming back. He doesn’t even let himself put his face on Eddie’s pillow, even if that means sleeping with his feet off the bed.

Sometime later, after he’s fallen asleep, Eddie comes into the room.

“You didn’t wake me up,” he says, tapping on Richie’s shoulder and shoving him a little to the side so he can get into bed.

“You were sleeping,” Richie mumbles.

“Should have woken me up.”

Richie is turned away from him, but he feels him lay down and then sit back up.

“Are you trying to give yourself a cold two days before your show?” Eddie snaps. He lifts the covers. Richie turns to look at him. “Come on, I don’t have all night.” 

Richie slides under the covers with him and Eddie touches his arm. 

“You’re freezing. Dumbass.”

He lies next to him, knees hitting the back of Richie’s legs, his head touching Richie’s back. He strokes Richie’s shoulder for warmth a couple of times, then drops his hand. Richie feels his fingers curl up around his shirt. 

He falls asleep.

**Thursday**

Eddie slaps his palm repeatedly against the doorframe to wake Richie up. Richie leaves out a groan and rolls onto his back.

“I’ll be late for work if you don’t get the fuck up,” Eddie says from the kitchen. Richie gets up.

The atmosphere is dry as they drink their coffee and pick at their toast. Richie keeps trying to put some distance between them for both their sakes and Eddie keeps fucking it up in a way that makes Richie’s heart burst with relief, take a risk and ruin it. Then Eddie won’t meet his eyes for a while and eventually everything will be forgotten, like when Richie tried to dance with him and Eddie avoided him for a few hours the next morning but still found the time to make plans for when Richie would come to New York. 

Now they bicker about butter and discuss when it would be best to meet tonight so they can go to the party together, which means that Eddie’s found a way to rationally justify what happened last night. 

Eddie has always been very good at pulling excuses out of his ass instead of admitting that he enjoys being close to Richie, but he’s also always been very good at being Richie’s friend. He’ll glare at him with that expressive face of his and he’ll tell him about a funny accident with his neighbor’s AC or he’ll reach to steal his toast with butter, as swift as a sparrow. In the morning he uses cologne and an aluminum-free tea tree deodorant, but Richie remembers when he perennially smelled like sunscreen and teenage sweat. He doesn’t wish they were kids again, but there’s a passion in Eddie’s temper that makes him feel excited about life like he was that summer so long ago. He’s always prided himself on knowing how to get Eddie’s attention but Eddie should win a fucking medal for knowing exactly how to keep Richie’s. He has it without reserve.

He wonders what would happen if he told him how happy he is to be here.

“Jesus Christ, Eds,” Richie says that night, as they stand in front of Eddie’s office building. “This place looks  _ legit _ !” 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“This is a place for  _ rich  _ people!”

“I told you I worked with movie stars, what did you expect?”

“You’re a risk analyst! I thought your office was a hole in the ground at best!”

“Yeah, well, you should see the office I’m trying to steal from my asshole boss,” Eddie replies, and Richie can hear that he’s pleased to have impressed him.

Richie looks up at the skyscraper that’s all glass and steel and Wall Street money and realizes it’s no wonder Eddie’s job stresses him out if he’s working at this kind of place.

“Are you just going to gape at it all night or are you coming?”

“That’s what sh--”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie says, taking him by the elbow and leading him up the front steps and into the building. The hall is vast and spotless, with squared leather sofas and a counter that could rival an airport’s in a classic nonchalant display of wealth that’s trying its best not to be tacky and is succeeding. 

Someone takes their coats and gives them a token each and Richie immediately puts his own in Eddie’s hand and pats it slightly. 

“You’re like a child,” Eddie says. 

“ _ Kaspbrak _ !” someone calls, and Eddie spins around like he’s been tased.

“Sir. Good to see you.”

A man in his sixties, with gray hair and a towering built, is coming toward them. He hands the doorman his coat without even looking at him, leans on the counter while he waits for his number and points his finger at Eddie.

“Where’s the wife?”

“I’m divorced, sir,” Eddie says through his teeth.

The man lets out a boisterous laugh. Eddie is making no effort to reach him, but he looks frozen in his place; he waits for the man to catch up with them before he heads to the elevators. Richie stretches his hand to introduce himself, but the guy blatantly ignores him and puts his arm around Eddie’s shoulders instead. He’s still laughing at Eddie’s statement.

“You sure are, you son of a gun!” he says, and Richie, known for finding Eddie funny even when he’s not trying to be, feels a surge of irritation.

“There’s a couple of people I want you to meet,” the man says. “They’ll be a great trampoline for you in the future if you work them right.”

Richie meets Eddie’s eyes and winks at him.  _ Trampoline _ , he mouths, making a gesture with his hands as if he were about to dive into a pool, and Eddie barely manages to turn his chuckle into a cough.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, sounding almost deferential as if he didn’t just laugh at him. “But I’m not sure I--”

“Nonsense! You’ll see, Kaspbrak, your climb has only just started but you need all the help you can get.”

And that really does make Richie’s blood boil, because he’d be dead if it weren’t for Eddie so he’s pretty sure Eddie can do perfectly fine on his own

The man’s arm leaves Eddie’s shoulders once they enter the elevator and he finds some other acquaintance to bother. Richie and Eddie stand in the back, pressed against the mirror.

Eddie looks at Richie. “ _ Fuck me _ ,” he whispers, making sure to stress every syllable.

“ _ Asshole boss _ ?”

Eddie points at the man’s back and mimics cutting his own head with his thumb. In turn, Richie points at himself and Eddie and mimics stabbing the guy’s back, and Eddie nods.

The office hall is swimming with people, and Richie is thankful that Eddie immediately grabs his sleeve to guide him through the crowd. The lights are low, and purple and blue beams sweep the room intermittently. Waiters in black tie attire are serving champagne.  _ La Gasolina _ is playing. Richie gapes. Whatever he thought this party would be, this is not it. He’s so shocked he stops walking in the middle of the room to stare.

“What?” Eddie asks.

“You work at an insurance company!” Richie cries. He’s forced to shout to be heard through the noise. “What the fuck is this!”

“I don’t know, like, an anniversary or something. Maybe we reached some goal? I forgot. Who gives a shit. Let’s get something to drink.”

Richie knew that Eddie worked at a high-end place - he drives an SUV, for crying out loud - but this party looks better than any party he’s ever attended in Los Angeles as a B-or-maybe-A-list comedian. 

Before they can reach the open bar Eddie is ambushed by colleagues who won’t introduce themselves to Richie and look adamant to have a conversation with Eddie right this fucking second, because they won’t let him go. Richie hangs awkwardly by his side for a few minutes, trying to make sense of their conversation about numbers or possibly graphs that he can’t even begin to understand because he’s smart but he’s not a business graduate.

“ _ Please get me something to drink _ ,” Eddie whispers to him. “ _ I’m going to fucking die _ .”

Richie complies, relieved, though he’s not sure alcohol is the solution to the kind of problems Eddie seems to be having at work. He makes his way through the crowd until someone grabs him by the shoulder, making him recoil.

“Hey, champ,” he says. “Are you…” 

Richie braces himself to say:  _ no, I’m not Richie Tozier, I hate that guy _ .

“Are you the… guy?” the guy asks instead while tapping on the side of his nose.

So it’s  _ that _ kind of party. 

“No, I have asthma.”

He does his best to lose the guy as soon as possible.

He’d get something decent for Eddie but at this point he’s not sure if he trusts the open bar, so he asks for two beers. The barman narrows her eyes and keeps staring at him even as she goes to the fridge to get him his two bottles.

“Are you Richie Tozier?” she asks when she comes back and puts them on the counter.

Richie opens his mouth.

“My girlfriend loved your last show,” she says.

“The one I did this year?”

“Yeah, she saw you in Boston.”

“Oh. Well, that’s… thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she says, and then she’s called over to the other side of the bar and he’s left standing there with his two icy brown bottles and the feeling that maybe there’s some hope in this world. 

He bounces back to Eddie only to find him already drinking champagne while his colleagues pull about him with question after question.

“Kaspbrak,” he says. “You’re needed to the other side of the room, sorry, ladies and fellas, big boss rules, this man has  _ got-to-go _ .”

“Yeah, sorry,” Eddie echoes. “Big boss rules.”

He pushes past people to get away, Richie trailing cheerfully behind him until they’re standing next to a food cart in the space under the stairs that lead to the upper floor of the office. He hands him his beer; Eddie doesn’t even complain about having to drink from the bottle, which can’t be a good sign.

“Are these people always wearing you out like that?”

Eddie puts his bottle on the cart and glares at him. “That’s rich coming from you.”

Richie instinctively takes a step back and bumps into someone. There are too many people and he’s trapped under the stairs with the fucking vol-au-vents.

“I know,” he says, wondering if there’s anywhere to look that won’t make him feel like he’s got to push past everyone and get out right now or he’ll be trapped in here forever like he was trapped in a hole in the sewers like a rat as It tried to drive him out into the open.

Eddie frowns. “I was joking,” he says.

“Yeah, right.”

“Fine, you’re annoying, but I encourage you, so I’m pretty sure that makes me a willing participant in your dumbfuck jokes that you always take too far. And… and you’re nicer than you think.” He looks straight into Richie’s eyes, the way Richie looked at him when he said,  _ you’re braver than you think _ .

The room is dark and they’re standing close and it almost feels like a parody of the time Eddie almost died except now it’s Eddie’s boss who’s waiting for them somewhere. And Eddie just told him he’s  _ nice _ \- or, at least, nicer than he thinks, which may not exactly be the same thing.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“I mean, you know. I know I’m not easy.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Remember in Derry,” he says. “When we were at the Chinese restaurant, before all that shit with the fortune cookies went down? You made such a big scene about me having a boring job but then you actually listened to me when I told you about it.”

He wonders if it’s the alcohol that makes him say this. He also wonders if this is the same guy who wouldn’t look at him in the eye this morning, because now he seems so intent on getting all of Richie’s attention until Richie gives him a sign that he’s understood.

Someone bumps into one side of the cart and the other side hits Eddie’s hip.

“Oh my god! Come with me. Now.”

Richie follows him upstairs. Eddie leads him into a half-empty side corridor. He takes his wallet out of his inner breast pocket, gets a card and presses it on the screen next to the door to unlock it.

“You’re like a tiny James Bond!” Richie pipes up.

“I fucking wish I had the license to kill.”

He closes the door behind them. They’re in another open office space, this one clearly designed for doing actual work instead of entertaining people and showing off like the hall downstairs. There are rows of desks and rooms with glass walls.

“This where you work?”

“Yeah. I’ll show you my office.”

“What does the size of an office say about--”

“Beep beep, Richie.”

“Hey, aren’t there any lights?”

“Yes, obviously, dummy, but we shouldn’t be here.”

Richie follows Eddie closely, trusting that he knows the way through the desks in the penumbra. Eddie pushes another glass door open and lets him in. There is a board on the wall in front of the desk and a framed picture of the New York skyline because New Yorkers are  _ that _ narcissistic. It’s little more than a cubicle with transparent walls, and it would scare the shit out of anyone who’s afraid of heights because its window runs from the ceiling to the floor and it looks like you’ll fall off the building if you enter the room too quickly.

Richie immediately goes to the window. They’re so high up it gives him vertigo.

The only light comes from the city outside. The night is clear, but black clouds are accumulating over the horizon. 

Eddie is sitting on the desk, his expression unreadable, and Richie smiles at him before going back to spotting New York buildings outside, and then he realizes that this is where Eddie was when he told him about his show.

It’s jarring to be here. It’s jarring to be in his office, in his home, in the Ikea that hasn’t banned him yet. They all built themselves a life on autopilot like Jennifer Garner in  _ 13 Going On 30 _ and now they’re grappling with the consequences because they don’t get a do-over as she did. They missed so much of each other over the years that all they can do now is share what they have and pray it’s enough because the horror they went through will always tie them together but the scars on their hands have already faded, and friendships die easily if they aren’t kept ablaze. Eddie is sharing his life without reserve, no matter how many missteps Richie’s made this week, and Richie knows that must count for something but he doesn’t know how to interpret it.

“So you liked me when we were kids,” Eddie says.

“Yeah.”

“Wanna know something fucked up?” He hops down the desk and joins Richie by the window. “So did I.”

Richie looks at him. He’s wearing a neatly-pressed shirt and a blue jacket, and his hair is perfectly coiffed. Richie had his interest at some point, and he wasn’t good enough to hold it. Something breaks inside him, but he holds himself together for Eddie’s sake.

“That  _ is _ fucked up,” he agrees. “I mean, I had a crush on the cutest one in the group, but you? You had no taste, man.”

Eddie turns around so that now his back is at the window and he’s staring into the dark office.

“I’m aware,” he replies, terse. “Also.”

“There’s  _ more _ ?”

Eddie glares at him. “ _ Also _ , I have a ticket to your show.”

Richie starts giggling. “What?” he repeats, mystified.

“You heard me, dickbag.”

“You bought a  _ ticket _ ? Some of the money in my pocket comes from  _ you _ ?”

“Fuck you, it doesn’t even fucking work like that. I hope you fucking bomb.”

“You don’t mean that,” Richie laughs.

“You know I don’t, don’t act all smug. We should get back now, we really shouldn’t be here.”

Richie follows him downstairs, two steps behind, too disconcerted to talk with him. Unfortunately for Eddie, his boss sees them coming down the stairs and calls for him over the chatter and the music, so loud Eddie can’t even pretend not to hear him.

“Kaspbrak! Where did you leave the wife?”

“Nowhere, sir, I told you, I’m divorced,” he says, walking up to him like a preschooler walks into kindergarten knowing he’s about to be bullied by vicious four-year-olds but wanting to put on a brave face nonetheless.

“You don’t want to witness this,” he tells Richie. It’s the first time he’s looked at him since his confession. “I’ll see you later.”

Left on his own, Richie wanders through the party and puts on the exact same brave face until he finds out that the office has a balcony and he rushes outside to get some fresh air. There’s a group of people smoking together on the left side of the balcony and he goes in the opposite direction to freak out in peace, hands gripping the parapet to ground himself.

Eddie liked him when they were kids. The boy who put his feet in his face when they were fighting for the hammock in the Clubhouse - he liked him. There was a time in his life when he carried a cast with blood on it.  _ LOVER _ , it said. Richie wishes he’d gotten a do-over, like Jennifer Garner when Mark Ruffalo rejects her because he’s moved on but she gets to wake up in a closet at thirteen-years-old, tell him she likes him back and never lose him again. He doesn’t want to be thirteen again, that was a terrible age, but he wants nothing more than to meet the boy with the cast and make things right. Eddie would still move on, at some point, but that’s just  _ life _ , and it’s something Richie never got to experience. 

Just for once, he’d like to  _ do _ something before it’s too late and he’s standing on a balcony in New York trying to figure out what the fuck he’s going to do with his show now, because he can’t change the script anymore so he’s stuck with telling jokes about the time he was a teenager with big boy feelings with Eddie in the crowd and the knowledge that if he’d told less dumb jokes and  _ done _ something maybe he could have been less miserable before he moved out and forgot everything.

He gets his phone with trembling hands, entirely sure that arthritis is in fact psychosomatic, creates a new groupchat with Bev, Ben, Mike and Bill and calls it  _ EDDIEMERGENCY _ . 

But what’s to say, really? Eddie told him about his old crush in confidence and there’s no way to explain the inadequacy he feels at realizing how much of a fake and a fraud he’s been all his life, making jokes and leaving everything that mattered unspoken.

He texts,  _ nvm I’m A-OK _ . His friends send him question marks and he puts his phone away.

“Hey,” someone says. Richie looks up.

One of the smokers at the other end of the balcony has approached him. He looks like he could use a jacket because he’s shivering in his light shirt. He’s a good looking guy, dark and short, and he’s smiling at Richie.

“Hi?”

“Nice shirt.”

He looks down at his shirt, then back at the guy. Earlier that evening, Eddie told him it looked like a Disneyland animator threw up on him.

“I, uh. Yours, too?”

The guy’s smile widens.

“You work here?”

“Nah, I’m here with my friend.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Your…  _ friend _ ?”

Richie knows this guy is flirting with him; in another time, he might have flirted back. Now he just squirms uncomfortably, because there’s no way he can explain the state of his friendship with Eddie. He’d just say  _ my boyfriend, actually _ \- if that weren’t a terrible idea.

“Yeah. My friend.”

The balcony door opens so violently it slams against one of the huge flower vases at either side of the entrance. Eddie stalks outside.

“ _ Richie _ .”

“Speak of the devil.”

Eddie approaches him. He takes the time to glare at the other guy, then plants himself in front of him to speak to Richie. “We need to leave  _ now _ , I’m going to  _ fucking  _ die.” He leaves without even waiting for a reply, and Richie and the guy send each other a puzzled look, both unsure of what just happened.

Richie shugs.

“Sorry, bros before etcetera. Bye!”

He runs after Eddie and catches him before he goes back inside.

“Who was that?” Eddie asks.

“I don’t know? What happened?”

“I shook hands with a guy who had  _ just _ touched his dick. I need a fucking bathroom right now.”

Richie leans against one of the stalls while Eddie scrubs vigorously at his hands. When Eddie tries to get a paper towel he finds the container empty and dries his hands on his pants with curt movements, frowning.

“I fucking hate this place,” he mumbles.

“Hey, Eds?” Richie calls.

“What?”

“Are you happy here in New York?”

He remains pressed against the stall as Eddie draws near.

“Don’t give a shit about the place,” he spits out.

His pointless profanity makes Richie chuckle. “As long as it’s not Derry,” he says, unable to restrain a grin.

“As long as it’s not Derry.” Eddie looks at him, and Richie wouldn’t mind staying there forever, pinned to a dirty bathroom stall by Eddie’s warm eyes. 

“Let’s drop everything and move to New Zealand,” Eddie says.

Richie smiles. “Okay.”

“Sure.” Eddie scoffs.

“You think I wouldn’t?” he asks him. “I stayed in Portland for two months, man, that’s like… ten years in any other state.”

“Yeah.” Eddie looks down for a moment, then back at him. “Thank you for that, by the way. I mean, for visiting me at the hospital.”

“It was a fucking  _ pleasure _ , Spaghetti man,” Richie says. He tries to make it sound like a joke, but it’s really not. He would have stayed a hundred years.

“No, for real,” Eddie says. “And thank you for just… keeping me company and leaving the nursing to the nurses.”

A heavy breath comes out of Richie instead of a laugh. 

“I mean, sure, man, I’m not a doctor, I’m just your personal jester.”

“My personal jester?” Eddie asks, incredulous. His hand suddenly pinches Richie’s side and Richie gasps. “You’d have to be funny to be my personal jester.”

“Come on, Eds, just admit I make you laugh all the time.”

“I would have fired you already if you were my personal jester,” Eddie says, raising his head defiantly. He’s all up in Richie’s personal space as if he thought stepping on Richie’s toes both figuratively and literally was the only way to grab his attention. 

The bathroom door opens and Eddie puts two steps between them immediately. Three men walk in. Eddie’s boss is one of them.

“Kaspbrak!” he says, cheerful. “Where’s the wife?”

Eddie’s eyes pop open. “I’m divorced!” he cries.

The three men reach the very end of the room and gather around the sink. Richie looks at Eddie, unmoving, until he hears the distinct tap of a credit card against metal and instinctively glances away. Eddie does the same, and when they look at each other again he mouths at Richie,  _ they’re doing coke! _

Richie peels himself off the stall and gets closer to him.

“I mean. Eds. What did you expect?” he says, trying to keep his voice down even though the three strangers are way too busy snorting blow to pay attention to their comments.

“There’s probably coke dust all over this entire  _ bathroom _ , Richie, we’re standing in it, you probably have some of your back  _ right now _ .”

Richie tries not to laugh. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Hey Kaspbrak!” his boss calls. The three men are looking at them and laughing. Richie arches his eyebrows. He’s going to fucking murder this guy if Eddie doesn’t get to him sooner. “Where’s the wife?” the guy asks, and his friends erupt into another fit of laughter. 

“I’m gay!” Eddie shrieks. “Oh my  _ god _ , Richie, let’s get out of here  _ now _ .”

He takes Richie’s hand, stalks out of the bathroom, and doesn’t stop until he’s out of the building and onto the sidewalk. They didn’t even get their coats.

“Hope you didn’t leave anything inside,” Eddie says. “Because, if you did, it’s gone now.” He starts walking down the street, his free hand buried deep in his pocket, and Richie catches up to him. He doesn’t point out that it’s November and neither of them is wearing their jackets because he’s pretty sure Eddie would just murder him on the spot. He doesn’t point out that they’re still holding hands, either. Then Eddie lets go.

“I’m going to quit my fucking job,” he spats.

“What, because your colleagues do coke? Because boy, Eds, do I got a thing to tell you about  _ my _ colleagues,” he jokes.

“No, asshole, not because they do coke. I can’t fucking take this anymore. I hate every goddamn second of it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Richie! I don’t fucking know! Not everyone can turn their life around like that!” He snaps his fingers to accentuate his words, and Richie frowns.

“Fuck you, Eds,” he says. “You think it was easy to do it?”

Eddie puts a hand on Richie’s arm to stop him while he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t easy,” he says, wary. 

“It’s okay.”

“It’s just that you all knew exactly what to do. Or… it looks like it. And I--I mean, sure, I got a divorce,  _ that _ had to happen, but I don’t know what to do now! I don’t know how to get better, I don’t know what that means for me, you’re all going around saying you’ve got to kill the clown and I don’t know how to do it.”

“You’ll figure it out. You’re a natural-born killer.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, like he doesn’t actually believe it. Richie doesn’t know how to tell him that he believes he can do anything and that he believed it even before he threw a spear at the clown to save his life. 

“So… you’re gay?” he says instead, and his voice comes out croaked, in a sick parody of the way it would have when he was fourteen if things had gone right the first time.

“What did you expect?” Eddie snarls. “Yeah, I’m gay.”

“So all the times with my sister…”

Eddie starts laughing. “Fuck you. What about you and my mom?”

They laugh so hard they’re both bent in two and Richie doesn’t even know why except this might be the single most relieving moment of his life. It was the 1980s and they were two gay kids with a crush on each other, it was 2004 and they were two men in their late twenties who longed with a connection with some stranger in a bar, it’s 2017 and they’re in New York again and they’re still alive and they’re together again. They’ve waited long enough, spent too much time with too much talk and nothing on the table. If someone had told Richie that their night would end like this, he wouldn’t have believed it. Richie always thought his life would be a tired stand-up routine where you know the punchline before it’s told, but Eddie has always been a much better comedian. As Bev said, truth, like a good joke, is a tear in existence. There’s no big sign from above to tell you when it’s time to come forth, only the incessant knocking of your heart as it tells you it is time, and if you are afraid you’ve got to believe you’ll be happy someday.

“How long have you known?” he asks, because he wants to know how much they’ve unknowingly shared all these years when their lives flowed separately.   
Eddie sweeps his face with his hand. “I can’t tell,” he says with a huffed laugh.

“Aw, I get it. You had a fucked-up childhood, too?”

“No, my life was perfectly normal, you’re the fucked-up one.” He looks into the late-night traffic as he considers Richie’s question. “When we were kids it was different, I guess. Especially the summer after we defeated It. But I still have to tell myself I’m not… sick. For it.”

“You’re not sick.”

“I know I’m not sick.”

He seems grateful that Richie told him, though. 

“I feel so stupid,” he adds. “Can you believe I thought I was just making things up as some sort of - what, escapist fantasy? Like one day I’d find a way to fix what I had and then I would stop thinking about it because it wasn’t  _ actually _ about that, but no, Jesus,  _ obviously _ I’m gay, I’m just the  _ last person on earth _ to see it.”

Richie reaches for him, puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Yes, you were,” he deadpans.

“We could have the contest of the fucking century trying to figure out who pretended to be straight in the most fucked-up, way, so don’t even start.”

“That’s true.” His hand is still on Eddie’s shoulder, and he moves it just slightly so that it’s resting above his collarbone. He doesn’t have any particular reason for it, but he doesn’t really care. “We should have just been less stupid when we were kids and gotten it over and done with. That would have spared us so much trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

Richie opens his mouth, closes it. “I mean.” It won’t do him any good to joke about it when the wound is still so fresh, but that has, literally, never stopped him before. “We should have just kissed and given ourselves our big gay awakening and less internalized homophobia for the next twenty years, but,  _ ya know, _ never been the sharpest tools in the shed, you and I.”

Eddie puts his hand over Richie’s and looks into his eyes. Richie’s heart leaps.

“We could do it now. We could scratch that itch.”

He’s fixing Richie with an intense stare. Richie’s eyes drop to his mouth. He could say yes. He could kiss him. He could put his arms around him like he’s always wanted, without reserve, just to get closer to him. 

If he did, it would take Eddie a second to figure out that to him a kiss would be much more than an itch to scratch. The devotion he feels for him would drop from his every touch and Eddie would find out, too late, that he’s being met with much more than he bargained for.

“No, thanks.” He takes a step back, lets his hand drop. “Your mother scratches that itch for me every night.” 

For a moment they stand there, looking at each other with terrified eyes, as the weight of Eddie’s proposal settles between them.

“We should call an Uber,” Eddie says.

“Why does everyone want to get Ubers? I hate Uber!” he says, voice high-pitched.

Eddie leaves out a sharp laugh.

“I fucking hate Uber!” Richie repeats just to see him laugh once more. 

They’ve got to move past this, and they’ve got to do it quickly. Eddie wanted to kiss him, and he said no. They’re tipsy, Eddie is upset, it was an emotional moment for both of them, they needed some comfort after such an eventful night.

“We should also go back and get our coats,” Eddie states.

“Oh my god, yeah, I’m fucking freezing.”

They get their coats. 

They call for a Lyft. 

They go to bed with a curt goodnight.

He wanted to kiss Eddie but that’s never going to be his answer, just like Bev told Ben she wasn’t his. Kissing Eddie won’t kill the clown - what might kill it is telling him that he wants to kiss him, because it’s by opening his heart that he kills the clown, but he can never do that. He can’t - he won’t - be one of the people in Eddie’s life who wear him out with their needs and demands and only give back in self-serving, half-assed attempts at reciprocity. He’s always been surrounded by people with such greedy hearts, and Richie won’t be that friend. 

He understands why Eddie proposed it, though. Eddie told him that it took him so long for him to figure out he’s gay because he’s never actually done anything, so Richie is sure that he was trying to kill the clown that way, but kissing Richie can’t his answer either. Eddie was trying to break the tension inside himself by looking for salvation in the closest place. And maybe it really would have given his younger self closure - maybe it really was just an itch to scratch - but soon he’ll find that there’s so much better in the world than Richie. 

**Friday**

Richie wakes up when a chair scratches on the floor. He sits up and sees that Eddie is sitting at the table and swallowing a pill with a glass of water.

“‘Morning.”

“It’s one in the afternoon,” Eddie replies, dry.

“Fuck!” 

He scrambles up, and his head sends a jolt of pain down his spine. It’s the last day of rehearsal, and he’s going to be late. 

“There’s toast,” Eddie says when Richie stumbles into the kitchen. He won’t look at him, which is fair, Richie thinks, even though it hurts more than his hangover.

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to get some fresh air. You’ll manage?” He says it like it’s a question, stealing a dubious glance at Richie before looking away. 

“I always manage.”

“Right. Jackass.” Eddie gets up from the table and goes back into his bedroom, leaving Richie there alone. 

Richie goes to rehearsal. It runs so late that Eddie is already asleep when he comes back home, or maybe he’s just pretending, which Richie wouldn’t put past him and doesn’t blame, either. 

He wonders if this is the time they’ve gone too far. He guesses it probably is. He never considered that, when the time would come, he would be the one who stays in line. 

**Saturday**

Richie leaves for the theatre in the early morning and lets Eddie sleep in for once. It’s a rainy day; he checks the weather forecast on the way and finds out that it’s only going to get worse. 

The Losers send him good luck texts during the day. Bev calls him, too, and he ends up telling her that Eddie is coming to his show and that he’s slightly freaking out about it. He’s sitting on a speaker backstage, phone pressed against his ear because the theatre technicians are running and shouting all around him, and he feels like a kid who just called his mom to ask her to pick him up early because the other kids are smoking.

“ _ Please, don’t worry _ ,” she says. “ _ Listen, I don’t really have time to give you an entire pep talk right now. But Richie - you’re forty-one. You have an entire bit about owning your shit. I know we haven’t exactly had a normal life and a normal development, but you need to grow up or it will kill you. _ ”

He still wishes he could ask her to come and get him because the other kids are smoking (because he’s scared and he’s making excuses) but she’s right, and they both need to go back to work.

“Thanks. I’m sorry.”

“ _ Come on, honey, you know I love you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay? It’s going to be fine _ .”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay, it’s going to be fine. Bye, Bev.”

“Bye, Richie.”

He ends the call. He doesn’t move, he just sits there with his phone in his hands until someone tells him to go back on stage. He tells his jokes to the empty stalls until he can say them backward.

“ _ This ain't for the best, _ ” Taylor Swift sings as he walks on stage that night. “ _ My reputation's never been worse, so you must like me for me… We can't make any promises now, can we, babe? But you can make me a drink… _ ”

The rest of the song, which will be played when he leaves, goes like this: “ _ Sometimes I wonder when you sleep: are you ever dreaming of me? Sometimes when I look into your eyes I pretend you're mine, all the damn time. 'Cause I like you. Is it cool that I said all that? Is it chill that you're in my head? 'Cause I know that it's delicate. _ ”

Richie tells his jokes. He looks at the pool of darkness in front of him and doesn’t let himself wonder where Eddie is sitting.

For the first twenty minutes of his act, everything is perfectly fine. 

Then shit hits the fan.

“The thing about your mom jokes is this. Say you’re thirteen, and you have a stupid secret teenage crush on one of your friends. And sometimes you feel like whatever’s going on between the two of you is way too charged for you to handle. Again - you’re  _ thirteen _ , so what’s going on is that, like, you have burping contests or something. And when you’re thirteen emotions are, you know, something you _ may _ have read in a science textbook,  _ maybe _ . Thirteen is that age where all the romance you had in you as a kid suddenly evaporates and you’re still a kid, but now you have the empathy and emotional maturity of a racist grandfather. So every time your friend looks at you, what it makes you feel is, well, that you want to throw something. I tried that, once, by the way, and I’m sorry to break it to you, but Batman? Doesn’t fly well! Also, super cheap! It fucking ripped open as soon as I threw it. 

“But also, every time your friend  _ doesn’t _ look at you, you feel like you might actually  _ die _ . So, like any perfectly adjusted person would do, you get this knee-jerk reaction that makes you yell,  _ I SCREWED YOUR MOM!  _ And boom, you got your friend’s attention. And also?  _ Every one _ of your friends hates you now.

“And all the time I’m like,  _ so I’m fucking your mom, and you’re fucking my mom, shouldn’t we just cut down the middle man and fuck each other?  _ Because, you know, I never actually wanted to fuck my friend’s mom. Or any mom. Or grandma. Or woman! Just ask any of my ex-girlfriends. Because I’m gay, and the person I was in love with… was God.

“I’m catholic.

“ _ Yo, did someone fucking cheer for that? _ Oh my god, I’m not catholic, I was  _ fucking _ with you, his name was Eddie.”

“Mr. Tozier,” someone interrupts him - one of the theatre technicians. She walks onto the stage and touches his shoulder to get his full attention. “There’s been an issue with one of the cameras, so we’ve got to hit pause on your act until everything’s been dealt with. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, you’ll have to…” She glances at the audience and licks her lips, in search of the right term. “You’ll have to give them a break, I guess.”

“Okay, uh. Just let me know.”

She gives him a thumbs up and leaves him alone under the spotlight.

He turns to his audience.

“Right! So, apparently, there are… technical difficulties? One of our cameras fucking burst? Seems like I embarrassed it too much. And they’ve got to repair it so until they’re done Netflix is forbidding me for being funny, which, like, feels like a metaphor for my life.”

He sits down, legs dangling from the stage. “I’ll just sit here,” he informs the audience. “Anyone got a question? Actually, I don’t care, I didn’t leave college to pretend to be a fucking teacher.”

That draws a laugh. 

“So, New York! Fun place. Still can't believe someone cheered for what was  _ clearly _ a joke about being catholic in  _ New York _ . I lived here for some time like twenty years ago but all I cared about was doing standup in bars so I never really saw the city. I've been here for a couple of days but I didn't get to do all the tourist shit now either. Me and Eddie went to Ikea the other day. Keep in mind that Eddie is a forty-year-old risk analyst who wears polos and, like, goes to the gym. But I swear you haven't lived until you've seen him shout at other drivers, and the bigger their car is the angrier he gets. So like:  _ this _ dude, trying to buy a closet at  _ Ikea _ . I’ve never written a joke that was as funny as going to Ikea with him. And then? He took me to an  _ office party _ . How adorable is that? He works at a place that’s so boring even  _ he _ admits it's boring. So, to shake things up a bit when we go to the party, I decide to wear the ugliest fucking shirt I own, right? ‘cause that's what you do. So, we get there; we don't have fun; Eddie starts talking to his colleagues so I got nothing to do; and at some point, I'm alone on the balcony and this dude comes up to me and tells me, hear this, that he  _ likes my shirt _ . And I'm like,  _ wait, did I hallucinate my decision to wear the most hideous shirt ever? Or maybe, like, at some point in the night some fairy godmother came up to me and quietly changed my clothes without telling me anything.  _ Me and fairy godmothers would get along super well because I'm really knowledgeable about at least two of those things. If I were catholic for real it would be all three. So this guy tells me he likes my shirt and I look down half expecting to see anything but my ugly shirt. But no, this dude really just tried to flirt with me by complimenting the worst item of clothing in existence. And I'm like,  _ okay, I need out of this situation right now ‘cause this dude is deranged _ . So I look at him and he's wearing a plain shirt that,  _ somehow _ , looks even  _ uglier _ than mine. And I go,  _ I like your shirt too _ , which, like, what? I don’t even know. I was past knowing how to handle situations. And, like, I'm sorry to break this to you but this clearly proves that people in New York have no fucking taste. You know who’s the only person with taste in New York? The only person with taste in New York is Eddie for not being in love with me. And I swear people don’t give him enough credit for how well he handles me. I could ask him to elope with me and he'd just tell me to fuck off. Then we’d go on with our day as if nothing happened. Like,  _ wow _ , I  _ wish _ every friendship was  _ this _ fucking easy.”

“What the fuck, Richie?”

Eddie, in the fifth row, is standing up. 

Richie sees that the people next to him are trying to shush him and get him to sit back down, so he raises his hands to quiet them.

“Don’t—please don’t shush him, that’s… that’s Eddie.”

“Am I a fucking joke to you?” Eddie asks. 

Richie just stands there, tall and lanky and stupid, microphone in hand, no idea what Eddie is talking about but frozen under his furious stare.

“What are you—”

Someone behind Eddie says something Richie doesn’t grasp, and Eddie turns around and snarls, mocking: “ _ Is this a bit? _ Seriously? Are you fucking dense?”

“Why are you yelling at my audience?” Richie cries.

“Don’t let morons into your shows if you don’t want me to yell at them! You gonna tell me what the fuck this is all about? Am I a fucking joke to you?”

“Eds, Eddie, Eduardo, you’re gonna have to be more specific because I have no idea what set you off.”

“Have you thought that maybe the reason why our friendship is this fucking easy is that  _ you _ turn everything into a joke? I told you…  _ I confided in you _ ,” he whispers, full of vitriol.

“Speak louder!” someone in the back shouts.

“ _ Shut the fuck up, asshole! _ You’re turning everything I told you the other night into a fucking joke and you have the fucking gall to pretend that  _ you’re _ the one who’s hung up on me just because it’s  _ funnier, _ I guess, if you play the fucking victim!”

“Oh, sure, because you’re  _ not _ the one who hates that I’m hung up on you!”

“Maybe,” Eddie says, his voice suddenly even. “I’m trying to put some distance between us because you never take anything seriously and it’s goddamn exhausting. And before you make some stupid comment so you can draw a fucking laugh from these assholes and save the fucking day, I  _ am _ aware of the irony of me asking you to be serious about  _ something _ for  _ once _ in your goddamn life at your  _ own _ comedy show. But no, it’s amazing to know that you don’t actually give a shit about how I feel beyond when it’s convenient to you, so go on, make fun of me all you want.”

Richie stares at him.  _ I’m trying to put some distance between us because you never take anything seriously. _

All this time, Richie’s been making excuses. He makes jokes to get Eddie’s attention because he doesn’t know how else to ask for it, because he doesn’t know how else to keep it, and he makes jokes when they get too close because he doesn’t know how to handle it - because he’s always so scared. He pretends nothing fazes him because it’s so easy to be nonchalant about the course of your life, to play the role of the guy who doesn’t take anything seriously.

Eddie tried to kiss him and he said,  _ no, thanks, your mom scratches that itch for me every night. _

_ And all the time I’m like, so I’m fucking your mom, and you’re fucking my mom, shouldn’t we just cut down the middle man and fuck each other? _

He was so scared that Eddie would see right through him if they kissed. All this time he’s been rationalizing his fears and telling himself, always in retrospect, that it’s all for Eddie’s benefit. And there’s nothing he wants more than for Eddie to be happy and free of the people who brought him down for his entire life, but Eddie has shown him time and again that Richie has never been one of those people and Richie has been deaf to it, barricaded behind his fears. He thought he was doing him a favor, holding himself back, but Eddie never thought his heart was greedy. Eddie liked him when they were kids, he thinks he’s nicer than he thinks, he asked him to stay with him in California and he tried to kiss him and he slept with him as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He’s always reciprocated Richie’s affection in his own way, at his own pace, and he’s only been holding back because he thought Richie wouldn’t take their closeness seriously.

_ My choice was to trust him _ , Patty Uris said.

All this time, Eddie’s been his friend. He needs to trust that Eddie will be here for him if Richie tells him. He needs to trust that he won’t run away, that he won’t leave him when Richie tells him the truth. 

_ You need to grow up or it will kill you. _

_ Just don’t let the clown have the last word, yeah? You get to have that. _

_ Richie. You’ve got to let him know. _

_ You’ve got to accept that truth will create a laceration. And that may scare you. But the difference between truth and violence is that truth opens doors. You have to believe that good things will come out of those doors. You need a bit of faith in that. _

_ Richie said it best. _

_ Let’s kill this clown. _

The guys from Security have, at this point, approached Eddie and asked him to leave his seat. The people sitting next to him are standing up so he can exit the row and meet Dave and Leonard from Security in the corridor.

Richie drops the microphone on the stage and jumps down. 

“Fuck, wait, wait.”

“Sorry,” Leonard from Security says. “He can’t stay here.”

“I know, I know, just give me one second.”

The look in his eyes must be  _ desperate _ , because the guys step aside. Eddie stands in front of him, arms crossed.

“Eddie,” he says, still trying to organize his thoughts after his epiphany. “I’m not doing this to make fun of you. Please, just… have faith that I care about you.”

Eddie softens at that - he sees it in the way his arms relax from their knot and his frown grows contrite like he’s not enjoying Richie’s distress, either.

“I know you care about me,” he murmurs.

“Yeah, no, I know you know, but--we all need to hear stuff from time to time, yeah?”

Eddie nods curtly. More than anything, Richie needs to let him hear that he’s choosing him. 

“I’m not making jokes about us because I think it’s funny that we’re repressed, I’m doing it because I’ve never had the guts to tell you I’m in love with you.”

“If you’re joking I’m going to kill you right here in front of the cameras.”

“Of course I’m not fucking joking! I thought you’d hate me if I told you and I was scared!”

Eddie leaves out a ragged breath. “How are you so stupid--have you never noticed that every time you give me your attention all I want is to keep it?”

“Boss?” Dave from Security says. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to escort him out.”

“No, you--”

“Richie. I screamed at you for five minutes. I think we should let them kick me out.”

Richie trusts him. “Okay.”

“See you at home.”

He climbs back onto the stage. He retrieves his microphone.

“I bet the guys at Netflix are really glad they made you people sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Or a N-Eddie-Sclosure Agreement, as I like to call them. By the way, is there, like, a therapist in here?”

Several people in the audience raise their hands.

“Oh, okay, holy shit. I’m, like, slightly offended. I’m guessing the rest of you are gay graphic designers and theatre people.”

**Sunday, at about one in the morning**

“I signed an NDA,” Richie says when Eddie opens the door. “And I’m going to break it right this fucking second to ask you what happened in there, Eds.”

Eddie takes a step back to let him in. He hasn’t changed his clothes from the theatre and he’s fixing Richie with the same glare.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” Richie pleads him.

“I don’t know, I was upset! And it’s not like I interrupted your show.”

Richie sighs. “You know I don’t own the rights to those recordings, don’t you? I can only tell them how to edit the material, but if they decide to keep that in, they’ll keep it in. You just…  _ Eds _ , you just said that in front of everybody.”

“Yeah, well, fuck off, you just released an hour-long fucking monologue about being gay, you don’t have the fucking monopoly on being dramatic, so you can suck my dick.”

“Like… now?” Richie jokes.

Eddie throws his hands in the air leaves out a groan. “Oh my—you realize I’m gonna have to rethink all of my insults, right?”

“ _ Fuck you, Richie, I hope they cast you as the lead in a Hallmark movie _ .”

Eddie crosses his arms. He’s biting back a smile. “That one’s good,” he concedes.

“So are we going to, like, talk about it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, we should.”

He moves to the kitchen and Richie follows him, taking his jacket off and leaving it on the back of a chair. Eddie sits at the table but he leans against the counter, unable to sit down, and after a moment Eddie gets back up so that they’re standing in front of each other though there’s still space between them.

“When you said you liked me when we were kids,” Eddie begins. “You meant…”

“I meant it. But I… it hasn’t ended.”

Eddie inhales sharply. He clenches his jaw. He seems to be working at something in his head but he doesn’t say anything and leaves Richie hanging there, his heart dissected on the operating table beating louder and louder and louder. Richie never thought he’d be so afraid of the truth.

He understands what Bev meant. He’s afraid, but he presses on.

“You told me you want my attention,” he whispers.

“Yeah.”

He can’t take it anymore. “Do you love me back?” he asks, voice breaking. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t. We’ll just be friends, it’s fine, I’m cool with that, I’ll probably turn it into a joke in my next special, but please just tell me.” 

“Did you fucking—all I’ve been saying—obviously it hasn’t ended for me either”

Eddie comes up to him. He smudges his cheek with the heel of his hand to dry a tear and then leaves his hand there, on the side of Richie’s face. He puts the other hand on the back of Richie’s head to pull him down and presses their mouths together. 

When they part, the look in his eyes is even. They hold each other’s gaze.

“I fucking hate that doormat you bought,” he says.

Richie laughs. He feels so relieved. He rests his forehead on Eddie’s and closes his eyes. 

“It’s our doormat now,” he replies.

“No, it’s not. You’re throwing it away.”

“Why aren’t you throwing it away if you hate it so much?”   
“Because I’m not fucking touching it.” 

He sounds so vitriolic Richie can’t help but leave out another small laugh. 

“Well, I’m not touching it if you’re not touching it.”

“I’ll fucking fart in your coffee until you throw it away.”

He’s here to stay. Richie kisses him.

“You kissed me for  _ that _ ?” Eddie says when they part. “That’s so fucking stupid.”

“I kissed you because you’re cute,” he says, putting his arms on Eddie’s shoulder. “And I’m still not throwing away Mat the doormat.”

Eddie puts his hands on Richie’s hips, holding him close as he bites back a reply.

“I’m gonna have to fucking move out of here just so I don’t have to see that doormat ever again.”

“Works for me. Eds - move to L.A. with me.”

It’s early, he knows, to ask someone to move in with you when you’ve barely just figured out that you love each other, but it still feels long overdue. He wants to build a home with him. He wants them to have too many sets of glasses and rows about the proper dosage of fabric softener. It’s been so long. 

“My lease is up in two months,” Eddie says. He smiles at Richie.

Finally, they can go home.

**Sunday (later)**

Eddie blows a puff of air on Richie’s eyelids to wake him up.

“Asshole,” Richie mumbles, finding Eddie’s jaw with his hand and patting it away.

Eddie grabs his hand to stop him and strokes his fingers with his thumb. 

Richie smiles and opens his eyes.

“If you want to make a joke, it’s now or never,” Eddie warns him.

“I can’t believe I spent so much time sleeping with your mom when I could have--”

Eddie puts his head on his chest, exasperated. “Shut up,” he says, and his annoyance is nowhere near credible when he has an arm around Richie’s torso and their legs are tangled together. 

Richie holds him even tighter. 

“Hey, Eds?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Are you against kissing if neither of us has brushed their teeth and, if so, how against it are you from one to ten?”

“I have brushed my teeth,” Eddie says, face still buried in Richie’s t-shirt. “I woke up, like, an hour ago.” 

He turns around, and Richie immediately misses his warmth. He stretches his hand to get something from the bedstand - a packet of mints. He presses it into Richie’s open palm, and Richie grins at him before putting it in his mouth and pinching his cheek lightly as an annoying thank you.

“So is this what you thought about when you woke up this morning?” he asks. He knows he doesn’t look credible, either, when he makes fun of Eddie while gently brushing his cheek. 

“Maybe.”

Eddie has a long, white scar where the knife sunk into his flesh. Richie can’t even begin to imagine how it must have been like to be stabbed in the face and to have the mindfulness to extract the knife and stab his attacker. He traces the scar with his knuckles and Eddie closes his eyes, overwhelmed, as if his touch was a soothing balm on an open wound. Then he grabs Richie by the collar of his t-shirt and pulls him closer for a kiss.

“We should tell the others,” he says sometime later, when Richie is lying down with his head on Eddie’s chest, his ear right above his heart.

“What exactly should we tell them?”

Eddie pulls at one of Richie’s curls and he looks up at him.

“That my neighbor had an accident with his AC--what do you think?”

“Okay, I’ll call them, they’ll love that story,” Richie jokes, and Eddie flicks at his forehead.

“Stop - you’re not calling anyone before we’ve decided what to tell them, I know you’ll end up making them think that you went home with some rando last night if we don’t plan this.”

That is a good idea, Richie thinks, and he files it away for later. “They pretty much already know everything I told you last night,” he admits. “They’re, like, scary perceptive.”

“Yeah, they’ve been telling me I should… uh.” Eddie looks up at the ceiling, suddenly unable to look at him, but his hand finds the nape of Richie’s head and holds it. “We should tell them that you love me and I love you back and we told each other. Finally. God, I can’t believe we’ve been so stupid. They’re not scary perceptive, we’re just insanely slow, how did we use the same excuse and not  _ realize _ we were both saying we liked each other when we were kids to avoid saying that we still do? And we should tell them I’m moving to California with you. If you still want me.”

Richie plants a kiss on his chest.

“Actually, I changed my mind. I hate you now and also I’m straight. We’ll never see each other again and I’m going back to making terrible jokes about being an asshole to women.”

As it turns out, whenever Eddie is too overwhelmed to meet his eyes, all it takes is one dumb joke and suddenly he’s back to glaring at him. “I’m fucking making sure you never do that shit ever again.”

Richie lifts himself up to kiss him on the mouth, then pulls back to look at him. He touches his temple, his cheek, his jaw, and he doesn’t worry whether he’s being too  _ much _ . Eddie’s here, and he’s coming to California, and they’ll be home and they’ll figure out the rest as they go. So much could have gone wrong, but they’ve made it this far. 

Richie has been in love with him since he was a kid. All this time, Eddie loved him back. He carved their initials on the kissing bridge because he’d fallen in love with an intensity he would have never expected and he brought that longing with him wherever he went for the next thirty years. So much has happened since that summer, so many awful, dreadful things, but those kids who playfully shoved each other and read superhero comics with a torchlight under the bed on a school night are finally out of the dark.

His eyes sting with everything he’s been holding back, and he dries them on his arm.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Eddie says, panicked. “Are you going to cry? Stop, you’ll make me cry, too, what the fuck!”

He wipes his eyes, too, with the back of his hand.

“Fuck, no, sorry, something got in my eyes,” Richie says.   
“No, it didn’t.”

“No, okay, it’s just--I was thinking…” He doesn’t want to turn this into some sappy moment where he tells Eddie that he teared up because he’s so full of affection for the kids who loved each other in 1989 and who were lost for so, so long. “I was crying-laughing, actually, because your dick looks really funny.”   
“Fuck off!” Eddie screams, shoving him off. “My dick looks normal!”

Richie rolls onto his back and laughs.

“Fuck off,” Eddie repeats. “I’m going to take a shower. Call the Losers in the meantime.”

“Your dick is fine!” Richie shouts after him once he’s disappeared into the bathroom.

“ _ I know! _ ”

He puts on a t-shirt, retrieves his phone from the jeans he dropped on the floor last night and pulls up the groupchat named  _ EDDIEMERGENCY _ .  _ skype now _ , he texts.  _ code red, reverse beep beep _ .

He opens the Skype app and waits for all of their friends to be online before starting a group call.

“ _Is everything okay?_ ” Ben immediately asks. He’s in an office, which tells Richie that his _reverse beep beep_ must have worked miracles.

“ _ How was the show? _ ” Mike asks. “ _ Did something happen? _ ”

Richie sighs. “I went home with a guy last night,” he says, voice dreamy. “You know when you feel like you’ve known someone your whole life?”

“ _ With… a guy? _ ” Bev says.

“Yeah. What, did you think the gay thing was a joke?”

“ _ No. But… _ ”   
His friends look frozen in place. Bill is gaping slightly. All the time they’ve spent hearing him talk about Eddie - and all the time they must have spent hearing Eddie talk about Richie, if they’ve been encouraging him to speak up - and now Richie tells them that he’s gone home with a stranger. They’re at a complete loss of words, and Richie is enjoying it immensely.

Eddie emerges from the bathroom wearing a long-sleeved polo and tight sweatpants that show off his thighs, and Richie arches his eyebrows at him in appreciation. 

“He’s here,” he tells the Losers. “Hey, come and say hi.”

Eddie climbs into bed next to him and says: “You were pretending you went home with some random guy, weren’t you?” He kisses him when he nods.

“ _ Oh, thank god! _ ” Bev shouts.

“ _ Tozier, I swear, I was about to die. _ ”

He lets them tell him how cruel and stupid he’s been for a few minutes, then says: “So, how come you didn’t tell us anything when you knew how much we were suffering?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Would you have let us wallow in our fucking misery forever?”

“ _ Nah _ ,” Mike says. “ _ We decided that we would wait, like… what, three years? And then we’d force you to figure things out. We didn’t plan anything specific, though. We didn’t really  _ enjoy  _ the prospect of having to throw you two into a closet, pun not intended. _ ”

Richie looks at Eddie, who meets his eyes and smiles. 

* * *

“Then the novelty of it ended and five months later we broke up,” Richie tells the audience. “Sometimes things just don’t work out the way… nah, I’m fucking kidding. I swear, the guy must be either a cautionary tale or a fucking legend among risk analysts. Dude storms out of an office party, has a breakdown during a live recording that gets on Netflix worldwide, two months later he leaves his job and moves the other  _ side of the fucking country  _ and gets a job that pays  _ way _ much less just to be with a B-list comedian that  _ nobody _ thinks is funny. We’ve been together for two years now and I’ve known he’s the love of my life for, like, thirty.”

He smiles.

“And do you know how I know? He’s the third funniest man I know, but he’s the only one who has the guts to interrupt me during a live show. That was the most terrifying moment of my life and I literally had to fight a demon clown from outer space and kill a guy, like, very gruesomely. But in retrospect he set such high standards. Doing a one-man show feels so reductive now. There's a part of me that's really _ , really  _ wishing one of you would actually stand up and scream at me. I'd love to have an unscripted argument right here. Because that show had that whole thing going on for itself, but  _ this _ show is basically living off past jokes by inertia. And I can’t have that. So, tonight, I want to do something special. Just…”

He walks to the front center of the stage, where he’s left the microphone stand, and places his mic there. Hidden behind the prompter’s box there is another microphone with its own stand; he sets it about half as high as the first one.

“Okay, I’m ready. Eddie - I carved our initials on a bridge when I was thirteen because I may have been a fucking idiot who liked mom jokes too much but I knew I wanted to be with you forever. You’ve had the misfortune of knowing me your whole life, and I’m sorry about that. But having known you my whole life is the best thing I could ask for, even if we didn’t talk for almost thirty years in the middle.”

He takes a small box out of his trousers pockets, gets down on one knee and speaks into the second microphone, the one he just set.

“So, Eddie Kaspbrak, will you marry me?”

The question hangs in the air.

Nobody, in the entire theatre, is breathing.

“Gotcha! He’s not here. No, don’t boo, cut the guy some slack! He’s heard this show like a thousand times already, he didn’t have to come. Also, this is an onion ring.” He plucks it from the fancy box and eats it. 

“But I definitely am going to propose to him for real. Maybe I’ll do it once I get home. I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna go.”

He takes the microphone from the stand and goes back to the middle of the stage, where he acts what will happen.

“He’ll be asleep on the couch when I get home. I’ll go up to him. I’ll pinch his cheek to wake him up. And he’ll yell at me but that won’t faze me the  _ slightest _ , for two reasons.  _ One _ , he was sleeping on the couch so he wanted me to wake him up once I got home - he told me this once: if he’s asleep on the couch it’s because he wants to go to bed when I do. I think he might like me, but don’t tell him, he’s very sensitive about that. And  _ two _ : I’m a motherfucker anyway. Once he’s up, I won’t even wait for him to stop screaming. He’ll be in the middle of telling me to fuck off and I’ll just drop down on one knee. Imagine I’m down on one knee right now - doing it before fucking  _ killed _ my kneecap, I need at least a two-hour refractory period. Anyways, I’ll be on one knee. I’ll show him the box with the real ring. And I’ll say:  _ Eddie Kaspbrak, will you do me the honor of giving me your mother’s hand _ ?”

The crowd laughs. As he waits just a second before saying,  _ Goodnight, New York! _ , he hears a voice rise above the noise.

“ _ Beep beep, Richie! _ ”

Eddie is standing around the middle of the stalls, third seat from the corridor on Richie’s left. Richie can’t make out his face in the darkness, but he doesn’t need to. It’s him - he’s here.

He gapes.

“You’re almost making me wish I  _ actually _ didn’t come,” Eddie says.

A lively whisper rises from the audience, and the words  _ It’s Eddie _ are repeated often enough to be heard loud and clear from the stage.

“Why  _ did _ you come?” Richie asks, voice high-pitched in shock.

“Surprise?”

The audience starts cheering.

Richie just proposed to Eddie, on stage.

They’ve talked about this, obviously, or he would have never ended his show on that joke. But it’s one thing to discuss it, and another thing to do it for real. And it’s one thing to do it when you’re alone, and another thing to do it in front of virtually  _ everybody _ .

Richie turns off the mic and throws away. He scrambles off the stage, almost shattering his knees to jump off three steps in one leap. The cheering from the crowd turns into a roar when he meets Eddie in the middle of the corridor.

Eddie’s face is impassive. Richie wants to reach for him, but he thinks he might have actually fucked up. It’s bad enough to propose at fucking restaurants, where you’re basically pressuring the other person to say yes to manage people’s romantic expectations - and Richie just proposed during a  _ live show _ that’s going to end up on a streaming platform. He extends his hand, and he could touch Eddie’s shoulder but he doesn’t - he lets his hand hover in the air next to his arm and leans forward to talk into his ear. Through the noise, his voice is inaudible to anyone but Eddie.

“You don’t have to give me an answer right now, Eds - I would have  _ never  _ done it if I’d know you were here, I swear, I wasn’t even going to do it tonight--you don’t have to say anything right now.”

Eddie’s deadpan expression crumbles into laughter. He puts his hands on Richie’s face and kisses him. They part quickly, because this is  _ still _ not the kind of show Richie meant to put up, but Eddie keeps his hands on Richie’s face and says, so close that their lips brush when he moves his mouth, “Ask me again when we’re home, Trashmouth.”

He lets his hands drop and takes a step back, and Richie finds out that the audience is doing a standing ovation. He gives Eddie the finger guns, a dumb lovesick smile stuck on his face from now until the end of time. 

He jogs back onto the stage, retrieves one of the microphones and waves his free hand high.

“Thank you! Goodnight, New York!”

While the outro song starts playing, he walks back to Eddie.

_ ♪The moon is high _

_ Like your friends were the night that we first met _

_ Went home and tried to stalk you on the internet _

_ Now I've read all of the books beside your bed _

_ The wine is cold _

_ Like the shoulder that I gave you in the street _

_ Cat and mouse for a month or two or three _

_ Now I wake up in the night and watch you breathe _

_ Kiss me once 'cause you know I had a long night _

_ Kiss me twice 'cause it's gonna be alright _

_ Three times 'cause I waited my whole life _

_ I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want, and _

_ I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want _

_ In paper rings in picture frames in dirty dreams _

_ Oh, you're the one I want _

_ In the winter, in the icy outdoor pool _

_ When you jumped in first, I went in too _

_ I'm with you even if it makes me blue _

_ Which takes me back _

_ To the color that we painted your brother's wall _

_ Honey, without all the exes, fights, and flaws _

_ We wouldn't be standing here so tall, so _

_ Kiss you once 'cause I know you had a long night _

_ Kiss you twice 'cause it's gonna be alright _

_ Three times 'cause you waited your whole life _

_ I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want, and _

_ I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want _

_ In paper rings in picture frames in dirty dreams _

_ Oh, you're the one I want _

_ I want to drive away with you _

_ I want your complications too _

_ I want your dreary Mondays _

_ Wrap your arms around me, baby boy _

_ I want to drive away with you _

_ I want your complications too _

_ I want your dreary Mondays _

_ Wrap your arms around me, baby boy _

_ Uh huh _

_ I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings _

_ Uh huh, that's right, you're the one I want _

_ I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this _

_ Ah-ah, darling, you're the one I want _

_ I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want, and _

_ I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this _

_ Uh huh, that's right _

_ Darling, you're the one I want _

_ In paper rings in picture frames in all my dreams _

_ You're the one I want _

_ In paper rings in picture frames in all my dreams _

_ Oh, you're the one I want _

_ You're the one I want, one I want _

_ You're the one I want, one I want♪ _

  
  



End file.
